We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  CJ plugged in. Sophie mounted up. The horse was relatively short; Sophie is tall, with long legs. Sophie’s feet seemed oddly close to the ground as the horse walked slowly along the trail; it was like an adult riding a pony at a petting zoo. Katrina had bounded ahead of us. As a cross-country runner and Nordic skier, she was in the best shape of the family. When she saw tall Sophie come around a bend on the short horse, she burst out laughing—not a chuckle, but a roar. CJ began to make jokes about Sophie on the horse. I was delighted that he was feeling good enough to malign his sister, but I told both Katrina and CJ to zip the horse jokes. The last thing we needed was Sophie dismounting in protest.

  We hiked on. CJ began to feel better and the music made the hiking more enjoyable for him. Sophie and the horse took a different path on occasion; we would look across a small canyon and see Sophie on her horse, plodding along with the other pack animals. I would wave and she would wave back jauntily. She looked better, too.

  After lunch, Sophie declared she would not be using the horse in the afternoon. “That’s good news for the horse,” CJ declared. We traversed the fifteen-thousand-foot pass, pausing for a group photo at the top. Everyone was now on foot. No one had altitude sickness. The rest of the trek would be lower and easier. Leah, who grew up in Colorado and has hiked across New England and the Alps, proclaimed, “This is the most beautiful hike I have ever been on.”

  The parenting gods gave us only moments of respite. The bright sun was reflecting off the snow. Leah, Katrina, CJ, and I had slathered ourselves with sunscreen. Sophie had refused. “I don’t get sunburned,” she insisted. Our children are one-eighth Armenian, which makes them slightly darker than the average white person. But the notion that Sophie would not get sunburned from twelve hours of exposure at high altitude was ludicrous.

  “We have another four hours in intense sun,” I pointed out.

  “It doesn’t affect me,” Sophie repeated. “I don’t need sunscreen.” There were two possible explanations for this claim. Perhaps Sophie had some miracle genetic endowment that made her impervious to the rays of the sun. If so, we might be able to commercialize this genetic good fortune and make billions. Or maybe Sophie was a stubborn teenager with a prefrontal cortex that had not fully developed, leading to impulsive acts and poor decision making.

  Which one could it be?

  I lost the sunscreen battle. We camped that night in a meadow ringed by mountains. I savored the sensation of crawling into a warm sleeping bag after a long day of hiking. We had aggressively hydrated all day; crawling out of a warm sleeping bag to find an outhouse in the dark is less pleasant. I fumbled around for my headlamp, put on flipflops, unzipped the tent, and tried to squeeze through the small opening without stepping on Leah or pulling a muscle. What greeted me outside was a full moon casting a bright glow on the snow-covered mountains encircling us. The campsite was quiet and still but for the gentle stirring of the horses. I stood marveling at the peaks, which were nearly as bright as they had been by day. The stillness of the camp made it feel as if I were the only one in the universe given license to appreciate the beauty of that moment. When I turned off my headlamp, I noticed that the moon was casting shadows. The horses, gently lit in the pasture by moonlight, looked like a painting of the American West.

  My three subsequent trips to the outhouse were progressively less enrapturing.

  The next day the terrain went from cold and mountainous to semitemperate as the trail led us back down to five thousand feet. As with the Amazon, we were in a totally different ecosystem. I spotted one flower after another that I had never seen before: domes the size of a tennis ball with tiny pink, orange, and yellow petals; tall stalks with furry indigo and white nubs; flaming red tubes the size of chili peppers that hung downward like bananas in bright clumps. I took photos of them all; sometimes I pleaded with a family member to pose in the frame. “Katrina, can you stand near those purple flowers?”

  “How many flower photos do you need?”

  “Can you just stand there?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll give you some of my fun money,” I offered.

  “Your fun money ran out like two countries ago,” she said. (This was inaccurate, though I was spending somewhat recklessly.) If I got lucky, Leah would happen along and corral one or two of the kids into a picture. “Look how pretty these red ones are,” she would say.

  “It’s his ninety-seventh flower picture,” one of them would point out.

  “I’m an artist,” I explained. As they laughed at me, I got the shot.

  At our campsite that evening, we had a view across a canyon of the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu. Juan Carlos loaned us binoculars and in the soft evening sun we could make out the structures of Machu Picchu. One more day of hiking and we would be there.

  We set out the next morning on the final stretch of the Salkantay Trek, which runs along a set of railroad tracks into the city of Aguas Calientes, gateway to Machu Picchu. The hiking was flat and short compared to earlier days, but we had two new issues on our hands. First, Sophie’s face was peeling off because of her earlier decision not to use sunscreen—dashing my plans to pay for college by commercializing her extraordinary genetic resistance to sunburn. Second, the whole town of Aguas Calientes was on strike—every restaurant, hotel, and business. The strike had started with the workers on the railroad that operates between Cusco and Aguas Calientes. Other businesses soon closed, both in sympathy with the strikers and because any business that stayed open risked getting a brick through the window. The whole city was effectively shut down.

  The final six miles into Aguas Calientes were on a trail that ran along a railroad bed. The hike felt postapocalyptic: scores of people fleeing in the other direction with their possessions. Most of the tourists streaming past us had expected to take the train back to Cusco; now they were walking. Some clutched bags to their chests. Others were trying to pull wheelie-board suitcases along the bumpy railroad tracks. Many looked unfit to hike a long distance. Some of the women were in high heels. We, of course, were going the other direction—past the fleeing hordes into a city that had been closed by a general strike. What if Machu Picchu was closed, like Walley World at the end of the movie Vacation?

  When we arrived in Aguas Calientes, every business along the main street was shuttered. Strikers and police officers mingled uneasily. We sat on the sidewalk while Juan Carlos set off to take stock of the situation. He returned half an hour later with good news: we would be able to check into our hotel. “But don’t enter as a group,” he instructed us. “Go in one or two at a time.” When we found the hotel, we lingered on the other side of the street. The lights in the lobby were off. Sophie and I walked to the entrance, where there was a handwritten sign on the front door expressing solidarity with the strikers. “Is it open?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Sophie said, peering into the dark, empty lobby. She tried the door and it was open.

  “Go in quickly,” I said. She disappeared inside and I walked in behind her. A minute later, the rest of the family crossed the street and entered the hotel as unobtrusively as possible.

  Once inside, we spotted a woman standing in the dark behind the front desk. She quickly dispatched us upstairs to our rooms. That evening, Juan Carlos summoned us and the other trekkers to a meeting in the lobby, where the lights were still off. “Everything is okay,” he offered in a tone suggesting that most things were not okay. We would be able to see Machu Picchu the next day, he pledged. After that, we would return by train to Cusco, either when the strike was resolved or on a special train the government was sending for stranded tourists.

  In the meantime, we had to find food. Juan Carlos led us through the empty streets to a restaurant that looked as closed as everything else. We looked through the front window: the lights were off; there was not a soul inside; the chairs were stacked on the tables. Juan Carlos pointed to a door on the side of the building. He told us to enter in groups of one or two and take a stairway up to
the second floor, as if we were going to a 1920s speakeasy. On the second floor at the back of the darkened restaurant, there was a long table set for us. The lights stayed dimmed as the waitstaff served the meal in the dark. We left as we had arrived, sneaking out the side door, one or two at a time.

  Each briefing from Juan Carlos seemed to bring grimmer news. The strike was going on longer than expected, he told us. The special government train to retrieve stranded tourists was postponed. On the other hand, Machu Picchu was open—and nearly empty. We took a small bus to the entrance early the next morning and spent much of the next day exploring the beautiful and enigmatic Inca city, with its terraces, stone walls, and canals, all juxtaposed against mountains so steep and lush that the sprawling site was not discovered until the twentieth century. The weather was warm and sunny. The rail strike had given us a gift: we had a World Heritage site almost to ourselves.

  Machu Picchu is a lot of things: a geographic wonder; an example of an extraordinary pre-Columbian civilization; and, perhaps most ominously, a reminder that even great civilizations can collapse precipitously. I had read Jared Diamond’s excellent book Collapse, which documents the factors most likely to cause advanced societies to unravel (e.g., climate change and feckless governing elites). The awe-inspiring grandeur of Machu Picchu makes its abandonment all the more sobering. For reasons we do not understand, five hundred years ago all the inhabitants died or left; the jungle began reclaiming the magnificent structures.

  Our visit was not entirely angst-ridden. At one point, Katrina tried to take a close-up photo of a llama. The llama smelled a granola bar in her pocket and tried to grab it. Katrina panicked and ran. The rest of us watched with amusement as Katrina sprinted across a flat grassy area with the llama in close pursuit, like two cartoon characters. Leah and I enjoyed having all three children reunited and in good spirits. They posed happily for selfies in the matching ugly green T-shirts that Juan Carlos had given us to promote his trekking company.

  All the while, there were vicious little mosquitoes swarming about. Unlike the mosquitoes back home, these creatures were hard to see and they bit aggressively by day. Leah, Katrina, CJ, and I sprayed any exposed skin with mosquito repellant. “These mosquitoes don’t bite me,” Sophie declared when I offered her the bug spray.

  “They bite anyone who has blood,” I said.

  “Not me,” said Sophie.

  Leah and I looked at each other in amazement. Sophie’s face was still peeling from the sunburn debacle. “Are we in some kind of parenting reality show that no one told me about?” I asked. I pretended to look around the trees for television cameras. “When does the host jump out of bushes and say, ‘Smile, You’re on the Teenager Show’?”

  The teen obstinacy was frustrating; Leah and I were also mildly concerned because every mosquito bite carries some health risk: the Zika virus, dengue fever, encephalitis. Once again, we found ourselves trying to figure out where we ought to draw the line between forcing sensible behavior and letting her learn on her own. We were enjoying a pleasant day together on Machu Picchu. I had no interest in chasing Sophie around with mosquito repellant.

  When we returned to Aguas Calientes that afternoon, about two hundred strikers were marching through a main street toward the depot where the tourist buses were parked. The police had set up a cordon to stop the protesters from getting that far. At first the demonstration felt like a parade. The protesters were chanting, singing, and waving placards. Sophie opted to head back to the hotel. The rest of us stopped to watch the demonstration as it moved steadily toward the phalanx of officers in riot gear arrayed shoulder to shoulder across the road. When the protesters did not stop, the police fired tear gas. Suddenly it no longer felt like a parade. The strikers and their supporters dispersed in every direction, running and screaming and crying. Katrina plunged into the crowd, pushing against the panicked tide to take photos of the reaction to the tear gas. This became her next Valley News article.

  Meanwhile, CJ had a panic attack, literally. He began crying and hyperventilating. Leah tried to calm him. “Breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe,” she urged. CJ was traumatized that the police had fired on the crowd. He did not realize in the moment—with people screaming and crying and running—that tear gas does not cause long-term harm.

  The protest eventually petered out without any serious injuries. We now had two challenges. First, Sophie was tormented by her mosquito bites. Suffice it to say that the mosquitos in Peru do bite her. (She ended up with so many bites on her ankles that she still had scars at the end of the trip.) Second, the strike had been extended yet again. Juan Carlos called another meeting in the darkened lobby of our hotel and informed us that the government rescue train would be coming . . . never. He laid out a different option: We could hike out of the city, reversing our six-mile walk along the train tracks. The tour company would send a van to pick us up at a point where the railroad tracks intersected a highway. From there, the ride to Cusco would be seven to nine hours on winding roads (which is why most people take the train).

  This plan was no sure thing. Juan Carlos warned that the strike was spreading. Protesters in neighboring towns might barricade the highway, preventing the van from reaching our rendezvous point. If we were to hike out, Juan Carlos advised, we should leave early the following morning under the cover of darkness to reach our van before the strikers barricaded the road to Cusco. Obviously we would have to take our bags with us. This was fine for Team Wheelan, of course: we had drilled for such contingencies. Okay, we hadn’t drilled for anything, but we weren’t carrying a lot of extra crap. Others at the hotel began scrambling to find porters to carry their bags; we could easily carry everything we had.

  We assembled the following morning in the hotel restaurant at four-thirty. There was an elegant buffet set up for us, which felt incongruous. On the other hand, if all the guests were sneaking out of town before sunrise, it made sense to offer them a nice breakfast. We ate a little and then walked out into the darkened streets before five. The city was eerily quiet; we walked in silence, even CJ. When we reached the edge of town, the police checked our passports, prompting me to wonder why one needs travel documents to walk out of town. They waved us on. The sun was coming up by the time we reached the railroad tracks.

  The morning was much cooler than our midday walk going the other direction. Also, the tracks had a slight grade and we were now walking downhill. All five of us walked fast, almost effortlessly. Our collective mood was ebullient, some combination of endorphins from the brisk hike and excitement from the early morning escape. We covered six miles in just over two hours and reached the hydroelectric station—our rendezvous point with the van—at about seven-fifteen. This was the moment of truth: Was the road blocked or not? If the van had not made it from Cusco, we would have to find a place to stay, or perhaps reverse course and walk six miles back to Aguas Calientes.

  As we emerged from the tracks, we saw vans and buses. Juan Carlos urged us to waste no time in getting aboard, as a barricade could go up at any minute. We loaded our stuff in the back of the van and rode off. The driver was good; the road was not as precarious as I had feared. We were going to make it to Cusco.

  Team Wheelan had fired on all cylinders. The day before, CJ had thrown a hissy fit over a pair of lost headphones. Sophie’s poor judgment and chronic stubbornness have been thoroughly documented. But on that morning, when we needed to execute—get up early, carry all our stuff, and hike briskly for six miles—every family member rose to the challenge. It is even possible, though I am not certain of it, that Sophie put on mosquito repellant for the walk.

  The escape from Aguas Calientes suggested that we were getting pretty good at the travel part of the traveling. The homeschooling piece, however, was a work in progress. Leah was teaching CJ geometry; he grumbled about the work but tended to get it done. I had the task of teaching him writing. We were making less progress, in part because there were no online assignments that I could direct him to do. In Peru, I
figured out something that should have been obvious from the beginning: CJ needed to write about things that interested him—like street food. For his first assignment, I told him to write a restaurant review of a small open-air Middle Eastern restaurant in Lima. He had gone back repeatedly, met the owner, and raved about the food. “I don’t know how to write a restaurant review,” he complained.

  “Just describe it,” I instructed. “Tell me why you like it so much.” He did:

  Amid the chaotic streets of downtown Lima, there sits a peaceful open-air café, with a juicy spit of shawarma outside, calling for the hungry pedestrian. Just twenty feet off of the sidewalk, one can escape the diesel spewing trucks and sit down in a comfortable Middle Eastern café. With help from the pillows, music, and paintings, it almost feels like a real shawarma stand in downtown Jerusalem.

  Not bad, right? The bigger project I would have to supervise was an eighth-grade research paper. I did not want CJ to reach high school without doing a proper research project: discerning data from Internet trivia; organizing an extensive amount of information; and writing it all up in a coherent manner. We agreed to channel CJ the Eco Warrior for the project. He would write about deforestation: causes, consequences, and potential remedies. The paper would be due by the end of the trip, with intermediate deadlines along the way (outline, list of sources, rough draft, and so on).

  Sophie’s schooling was turning out to be as frustrating in person as it had been from afar. We set several deadlines for VLACS assignments, all of which she missed. This was especially frustrating because now we could observe her watching Netflix and chatting with friends as the work went undone. We threatened to take the phone away until Sophie finished some work. “I want to be treated like an adult,” she challenged.