But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  It must have been something to take the breath away, Cusco. Having garrotted Atahualpa and massacred thousands of his men, Pizarro and his men entered the city on November 15, 1533. In Prescott’s telling: “. . . though falling short of the El Dorado which had engaged their credulous fancies, [it] astonished the Spaniards by the beauty of its edifices, the length and regularity of its streets, and the good order and appearance of comfort, even luxury, visible in its numerous population. It far surpassed all they had yet seen in the New World.”

  They did not tarry with sightseeing, but instead “lost no time in plundering . . . as well as despoiling the religious edifices. The interior decorations supplied them with considerable booty. They stripped off the jewels and rich ornaments that garnished the royal mummies in the temple of Coricancha. Indignant at the concealment of their treasures, they put the inhabitants, in some instances, to the torture, and endeavored to extort from them a confession of their hiding places. They invaded the repose of the sepulchres, in which the Peruvians often deposited their valuable effects, and compelled the grave to give up its dead. No place was left unexplored by the rapacious Conquerors . . .”

  There’s something else I’d like to have seen: the Incan counterattack three years later. The Spaniards had steel, gunpowder, and horses, but the Inca had slings, and according to Mann, could hurl rocks with sniperlike accuracy at 100 miles per hour:

  In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were red-hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the Spaniards, as brave as they were greedy, fought to the end. In a desperate, last-ditch counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.

  As we walked to the main entrance of the cathedral, I noticed a sign: ROOM OF THE INQUISITION. Our guide, Edgard Mendivil, a deeply learned man, explained that this had formerly been a museum. “But they finally thought it was strange to have a museum showing instruments they killed people with in the name of God, so they closed it and now it’s a shop.”

  A few years ago, a sixteenth-century papal bull was found in Seville. It officially designated Pizarro’s chaplain, a Dominican friar named Vicente Valverde, leader of the expedition. So it was technically his party. Open The Conquest of Peru to any random page and you will find the good friar explaining the Trinity to some Inca as the flames begin to lick at his ankles. In their first encounter, the otherwise hapless emperor Atahualpa had the good sense to tell this malefic ecclesiastical busybody to go stuff his Trinity. At their last meeting, Valverde generously offered to commute Atahualpa’s death sentence from immolation to strangling—provided he stopped being so obdurate about the Trinity and opted for the full conversion package. Yet another Inca, this one named Challcuchima, didn’t get off so easily.

  “Father Valverde accompanied the Peruvian chieftain to the stake,” Prescott writes. “He seems always to have been present at this dreary moment, anxious to profit by it.” (Not the sort of padre you want on the other side of the screen at Saturday afternoon confession.) Valverde was eventually slaughtered in 1541—not a windfall year for the Pizarro party, it would seem—by some apparently non-Trinitarian Indians. His cross survives. It’s mounted above one of the altars in the cathedral here in Cusco. Most crucifixes put me in a reverent frame of mind. This one chilled me to the bone.

  The train from Cusco to Machu Picchu runs along the Urubamba River through the Sacred Valley and into narrowing canyons. The roiling chocolate-colored water beside you eventually empties into the Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles later. None other than Jacques Cousteau figured that out.

  The Peru Rail engineers hadn’t yet completely deglopped the tracks, so we had to disembark, ride in a van a kilometer or so to the other side of the mudslide, and catch another train. This we did in concert with some eight hundred other people, seven hundred of whom ended up sitting on Dr. Melocotón’s and my lap.

  If you sit on the left side on the ride to Machu Picchu, you have bracing vistas of stupendous ravines, speckled with thousands of lush bromeliads; also wild magnolia, immense rhododendron bushes, ferns, liana vines, and Incan ruins. You’re in the cloud forest now, where the Andes start to give way to jungle. It’s a sight. Sit on the right side and your vista consists of hours upon hours of—rock.

  We disembarked in late afternoon at Aguas Calientes, the little town that serves as a launching pad for Machu Picchu. Most people spend their nights here. But you can now spend the night up top. We boarded a bus for the final stage of the journey: a 1,500-foot climb up a switchback road. I counted fifteen turns. The view down becomes increasingly impressive, so much so that I found myself thinking of an old friend of mine whose odd hobby it was to collect newspaper clippings about bus plunges. He had dozens. No bus plunged in Pakistan or Peru without his knowing it.

  We made our loud ascent, gears grinding, exhaust spewing. Perhaps noting my lack of color, or the fact that my fingernails were embedded in Dr. Melocotón’s forearm, Edgard said soothingly, “Sir, there has never—never—been a fatality.” Then suddenly a perfect rainbow appeared, and five minutes later we were checked into Room 40 (try to get this room if you can—it’s got the best view, but rooms 39 and 38 will do) at the Sanctuary Lodge and furiously gobbling tea sandwiches.

  There was less than an hour of light left. Edgard led us through the gates and up a trail. We came out of the bushes and there it was.

  The air was soft and hushed, except for the occasional whoops of a group of teenagers. The mountains were striated with wisps of mist as in old Chinese screen paintings. Swallows dipped amid the ruins. In the distance below, a small herd of llamas, necks comic and giraffe-like above the low walls, began their daily ascent back up to their night hut. It was a scene familiar from my earliest childhood, when I had first seen it in some issue of National Geographic. What the Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham thought when he first laid eyes on it on July 24, 1911, I don’t know, but it must have been some variation on “Holy s—.”

  Bingham found it, as discoverers so often do, by accident. He was in search of something else, an Incan site called Vilcabamba. On his way there, he encountered a farmer who told him, “I know a place.” Bingham told him, “Show me.”

  We sat in the gloaming as Edgard told us the story. The farmer said to Bingham, “Sir, it is a torturous road.” (He should see the bus ride.) Bingham said he would pay well for taking him. “How much do you make in a week?” The farmer named a sum. Bingham offered two weeks pay. The farmer held out. They finally settled on five weeks.

  “And so,” Edgard concluded, “Melchor Arteaga, this farmer, became the first operator at Machu Picchu.” Melchor was smarter still: The actual job of leading the gringo up the torturous road he delegated to the son of Melquiades Richarte, a neighbor, who thus become the actual first guide at Machu Picchu.

  It’s still not entirely clear why, exactly, the Incas built it. Theories vary. The one that makes the most sense is that it was a religious center and a depository for mummies. The Incas were crazy for mummification and treated preserved remains as living beings, much like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. It’s logical, then, that they would have taken their dead to a mountaintop metropolis built in the shape of a condor, god of the sky. Here the spirits of the dead could be assimilated into the heavens. What tips toward this conclusion is the evidence that very few children lived at Machu Picchu.

  Building all this was a staggering undertaking. Some sixty thousand workers spent seventy years on it. They lopped off the top of a mountain and built supporting terraces—8,000 feet above sea level. Not only did they have to hew the rock, they also had to lug up the topsoil. Two of the grassy plazas alone were sodded with an estimate
d 220 tons of clay, humped here clump by clump on aching backs from a riverbed fifty miles away. The human remains found here all show evidence of malnutrition. Why should that be, when food was abundant? The answer is—coca. They chewed the leaves to keep going. And if you’ve got a buzz on, hey, who needs food and drink? And all this effort to build a city for just a few hundred people.

  Who only inhabited the finished city for thirty years. Why did they abandon it? Eighty percent of the mummies show evidence of smallpox. The Inca were early believers in Intelligent Design; they didn’t believe disease was natural or random. “They thought,” Edgard said, “that this indicated that the gods did not like this place.” There’s another theory: that they put it to the torch and buried their mummies and treasures rather than let them fall into the hands of the approaching conquistadors. Edgard, who brings clients here fifty times a year and is well versed in the scholarship, subscribes to the approaching-conquistador theory. I’d have split, too, if I heard that Friar Valverde was on his way to talk Trinity.

  The next day, we climbed Huayna Picchu. (“Little Mountain,” Machu Picchu being “Big Mountain”). Huayna Picchu is the peak you see in the photographs that looms above the ruins like a mossy, breaching whale. For any serious mountaineer, it’s probably a Sunday walk in the park. For a middle-aged asthmatic gringo, it was work: 800 feet up at 65 degrees. It took us an hour, no reflection on Edgard or Dr. Melocotón. Edgard once did it in seventeen minutes, after hearing over the walkie-talkie that one of his clients had managed to fall off the top.

  What a view it is from up there. Edgard pointed out a declivity carved into the summit stone. An altar. They sacrificed animals to their condor gods on it. We posed for pictures.

  It began to rain. Edgard’s cell phone rang. The Inca didn’t have the wheel; their descendants have cell coverage at 9,000 feet. It was his five-year-old daughter, in tears with the desperate news that the bunny rabbit he had given her had died. He promised her a new one, and we started down.

  —Forbes FYI, October 2006

  DOGGED PURSUIT

  It’s a bit cramped in the back of the Cessna 206. The windows are frosting over, and as I scrape away the rime with the edge of a credit card what I can make out is not entirely reassuring. Fog and terrain—the latter is disturbing because it is at eye level. Nor is it reassuring that the automatic warning keeps announcing in computer deadpan voice: “Caution, terrain. Caution, terrain.” At such moments one asks oneself, What am I doing here?

  Aeronautically speaking, we are trying to find our way through the Alaska Range. That task falls to our pilot, an excellent fellow named Burke with whom we will bond tightly in the days ahead. Burke has a sweet, laid-back, Deputy Dawg manner, and a martini-dry sense of humor. He says, with a casualness that seems discordant, “Now we have the first serious obscuration ahead of us.”

  Burke executes a 270-degree turn in the narrowing canyon, looking for a way through the pass. The terrain is now not only eye level but quite close.

  “I believe,” Burke says, “we’re going to have to backtrack and find a different route.” He puts the plane’s nose down and soon we are flying low enough to make out moose tracks. It crosses my mind that he is using these to navigate. This does not make me less nervous.

  An interesting hour later, we are sitting at a bar called McGuire’s Tavern in a town called McGrath, thankful that the Alaska Range is behind us. Burke drinks coffee while his three passengers self-administer restorative liquids. The bar is decorated with old boxes of blasting caps and a mastodon bone. Outside it is 10 below. Among the four of us, we are wearing a serious amount of fur: seal, moose, bear, wolf, pine marten, sea otter, and Lord only knows what else—gerbil, possibly.

  The bartender hangs up the phone and announces, “Mackey’s out of Anvik.”

  That would be Lance Mackey, a champion musher of dogs; Anvik is a hamlet roughly halfway between Anchorage and Nome, which is by way of explaining what I’m doing here. I am following the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

  The Iditarod is a 1,049-mile sled dog race that honors the tradition of dog mushing generally and specifically the heroic “serum run” of 1925, when men and dogs braved the worst that nature could throw at them in order to bring diphtheria serum to icebound Nome. I grew up around New York City and many times have walked past the statue in Central Park of Balto, one of the dogs who accomplished this great feat. I now have a far better appreciation of what Balto and the other dogs and their mushers endured to save the children of Nome. After returning from this trip, I found myself quite by accident walking past Balto’s statue. This time, I stopped and took off my hat.

  I won’t recapitulate the whole story here, other than to note, with awe and humility, that it involved among other hardships temperatures of minus 60 degrees, gales of 65 to 70 miles per hour, and a dozen other ways of dying, none of them pleasant. The frostbitten and exhausted man who mushed the last relay team (including Balto) into the streets of Nome was named Gunnar Kaasen. In their gripping account, The Cruelest Miles, Gay and Laney Salisbury write, “Witnesses to this drama said they saw Kaasen stagger off the sled and stumble up to Balto, where he collapsed, muttering, ‘Damn fine dog.’ ” Diphtheria kills young children by a process of slow, agonizing suffocation. Next time you pass the Balto statue, pause in respect.

  The Iditarod race is run every March. Sixty-seven teams were competing this year. Mackey, a wire-thin man with a goatee and wolf-pale eyes, had previously won two Iditarods. The record time was posted in 2002 by Martin Buser, who managed to reach Nome in 8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, and 2 seconds, averaging more than a hundred miles a day. The distance covered—1,049 miles—is about the same as Washington, D.C., to Miami, only this route goes over mountains, lakes, rivers, and what must seem to them an endless stretch of Alaskan winter.

  We fly on from McGrath and reach Unalakleet at twilight. We tie down the Cessna. Alice, our hostess and owner of the Cessna, has made arrangements for the all-important plug-in for the engine warmer. It is essential, indeed imperative, in Alaska that you keep your plane’s engine heated so that it will start. This aspect of Alaskan bush aviation will become a major theme of our trip. Plug-ins are scarce at airstrips, with the result that people go around unplugging one another’s airplanes. This will happen to us, with the result that Burke and I spend the better part of one day trying to heat the Cessna’s engine by means of a gas stove.

  “Burke,” I say, pausing before setting the match to the gas in the stove’s priming cup, “is it wise to be doing this?”

  I ask this because the idea of inserting a flaming device into an aircraft engine full of high-octane fuel feels . . . illogical, somehow.

  “Yes,” Burke says contemplatively.

  The more immediate problem is the 30-mile-an-hour wind, which, in conjunction with the 15-below temperature, makes one’s fingers less than nimble. Burke tries repeatedly to start the engine. The propeller turns—rrruh-rrruh rrrrrrrrruh—and then stops after a few feeble rotations. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” meets “The Flight of the Phoenix.” In the end, a kindly flying cardiologist takes pity on us and lends us his super-duper engine warmer, which is like a giant hair dryer.

  At Unalakleet (in the Inupiaq language, “the place where the east wind blows”), we watch Lance Mackey and his team come in. He is comfortably ahead of the field, but wastes no time. He beds down his dogs in mounds of hay and cooks them a hot meal of beaver meat, frozen salmon steaks, and high-protein pellets. The dogs get four hot meals a day, consuming 10,000 to 12,000 calories daily. The dogs are thin and not at all large: 40 to 50 pounds. I’d been expecting enormous bruisers. Alaskan sled dogs are bred for one purpose, to pull. If it is grueling work, they nonetheless seem to love it. A volunteer force of up to forty-five veterinarians from all over the world tends to them meticulously, examining them at every checkpoint for signs of illness, dehydration, and muscle sprain. Dropped dogs are picked up by the “Iditarod Air Force,” a volunteer squadron of air
borne pickup trucks. A musher starts out with as many as sixteen dogs and must finish with at least five. There are casualties. At the Unalakleet hangar one day I saw two notices:

  The gross necropsy of Victor, a six-year-old male from the team of Jeff Holt, has been completed. No cause of death could be determined by the board-certified veterinary pathologist. Further testing will be conducted to complete the necropsy process.

  Nigel Is Found!

  On March 10, 2009, Iditarod XXXVII musher Nancy Yoshida (Bib #3) encountered a series of events in the “Steps” on her way to Rainy Pass that forced her to scratch from the race. The impact of those events included losing one of her sled dogs, Nigel. Nancy and the rest of her team stayed put for hours hoping Nigel would return and they could move forward. When Nigel didn’t return, she and the rest of her team made their way to Rainy Pass, where Yoshida officially scratched. Nancy and the Iditarod continued to search for Nigel on the ground and in the air. Today, Nigel was reunited with Nancy and his teammates after he appeared at Talvista Lodge in Skwentna.

  Lance Mackey did not linger long in Unalakleet. You don’t win the Iditarod by sitting around the fire reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” That night, we watched in foot-numbing cold (20 below) as he applied pink ointment to his dogs’ paws (fifteen dogs times four paws, with bare fingers; it took over an hour), then harnessed them. The dogs did not look particularly eager to be setting off. But off they went in the crunching cold in the direction of Shaktoolik.

  A promontory that juts into the frozen Norton Sound, Shaktoolik means in the Inuit language: “the feeling that you have when you have been going toward a place for so long that it seems that you will never get there.” Every child in the backseat of a car instinctively grasps the concept of Shaktoolik.