Monday, June 8, 2015

Levels.


My alarm goes off exactly two hours before the bus leaves, and roughly two hours after I suffer nightmares about missing it. In another twenty minutes I'm dressed, the backpack I fully prepped the night before downstairs with me, negotiating a 4am check out with the confused kid working the front desk.

"Now? You're sure you want to check out now?... You know it doesn't open for two more hours..."

A few blocks away, my lobby-poured coffee and I reach the parked caravan of buses at 4:10am to be the third person in line, behind one of the countless couples making this pilgrimage together. Within a ten minute span, I'm joined by my other 2 trailmates from the Salkantay Trek and our guide, and behind us stretches at least a hundred more people, though anyone more than that is out of range of both the humming light bulbs and my disinterested earshot.

I pass the next hour mostly with my neck craned up in weak-interest at a rerun soccer game between Uruguayan and Colombian club teams, as behind me a flock of purple'clad elderly women from the States perform chakra chants, their hands tambourining down the center line of their bodies. Morning calisthenics in sequined hats. As the buses next to us rumble to life just before 5:30, a girl from a massive group way back in line tries to convince the couple ahead of me, in a distinctly American accent, to let their group of 20 jump to the front of line. When she walks back to her group, scoffed at, defeated, I take one last look at the massive group behind us before piling into the bus that drives us up the 20 minutes of switchbacking road from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu.

The headlights cut the darkness as we rise up Hiram Bingham Highway, panning across the backs of the hikers, the idealists determined to walk up to Machu Picchu by way of a grueling series of steps. With each switchback and tier up the mountain, the day greys awake, making them easier to see, their exhaustion obvious, even in the fledgling light. When we exit the bus, there's a group of ten, the fastest, already sitting on the steps before the roped'off ticket inspection counters. They're absolutely flooded in sweat, and staring challengingly at us bus-riders with a palpable arrogance, but even with that, they'd earned my respect. For their commitment and far more so, their speed. Because by the time the next set of hikers reaches our plateau, there's three buses full of people in line ahead of them. Their lack of quickness betraying their abundance of determination.

Past the ticket check, any hierarchy becomes moot, instantly forgotten. I'm one of the first 20 people inside Machu Picchu on the morning of May 15, 2015, nearly jogging around corners with the sweat'drenched Brits to the first viewpoint. The anticipation finally giving way to the arrival. And for those few minutes it's ours. We first'and'early'risers, we trekkers, the fast hikers. Any arrogance melted away into ecstasy, into a pure childish wonder at where we are. When we are. The rarity of its pristine emptiness. Just briefly, we tear glances away from the wondrous ruins to exchange dumbfounded smiles. The possible-temple, possible-noble-retreat, the fabled Lost City. The vision of Pachacutec and the obsession of Bingham. Machu Picchu. Its stone'chambered vacancy a vessel for our awe.

And the early alarms, the grueling stair'climb, the foresight of others who booked Inca Trail reservations seven or eight months in advance, it's all for these sprinting minutes that dissolve too quickly. Because we all know what a shit show this is about to be.

This is the cost of doing pleasure. The trade'off of travel in the modern world. Machu Picchu holds a near unique spot in our consciousness, even if we can't pinpoint why.  We know what it is, but not what it was. It was commissioned by the Incas' greatest ruler, but as an observatory, or temple, or simple vacation resort, there's no uniform agreement. What it is now is a pilgrimage. A box on a checklist, or a bucket list, or a prerequisite for backpacking credibility. An obsession, a headless sphinx to challenge us. Simultaneously the most unifying and polarizing destination I have ever been to. Because it draws so many of us, no matter what our background, or travel motivation, or degree of commitment. And yet everyone wants it to belong to them alone, feels entitled to that ownership. Maybe because its walls stood here for centuries, in obscurity, if not true total abandonment, and we want that fantasy of untouched discovery to belong to us. 

The paradox is that everyone deserves to see this. Whether at the bus station at 4:10am to ensure a seat on the first bus at 5:30, or hiking the near vertical stair'climb, or entering directly by the Sun Gate after trekking for days on the Inca Trail. Or those who came by ways that they sound embarrassed to admit but shouldn't be, the trains that start arriving at 8:00 and the later arrivals flooding in all the way from Cusco. No matter what tier of tourist or traveler you are, Machu Picchu belongs equally to you as well. But it's because there's so many of us drawn here for the riddle and beauty and legend of its emptiness that it overflows with a cacophonous humanity.

It doesn't ruin the experience, but it does make those first few minutes even more precious. The very first fraction of the nine hours that I spent at Machu Picchu, climbing and descending its terraces. Seeing the absence before the abundance. Viewing it in morning mists, the clouds blindfolding the mountaintops, the shyness of the fog as it clings to smaller peaks below, like fraying coronas of liquid nitrogen, before an ascendent sun burns it all away. Before that god is chased away by grey herds of cloud and then rain. The arbitrary undulations that have occurred and been observed for centuries. 

The nine hours is long enough to recognize the order of Machu Picchu itself, beyond the simple level of commitment of the travelers that reach it. Or the tiers of visibility the Peruvian climate allows, depending on the time of day, the whim of weather. Time enough to spot how the architecture of the peaked roof supports echo Huayna Picchu above. The seemingly'crude rock in the Temple of the Mountain that from one specific point near'perfectly mirrors the outline of the mountain peaks directly beyond it. The curved walls of the Temple of the Sun that evoke the same torreón of the massive Temple of the Sun in Cusco, the Qorinkancha. But also the empty hierarchy of what it means to discover. Hiram Bingham was credited as finding the Lost City of the Incas in 1911, but it was never really lost. Quechua families still farmed its terraces, Bingham himself saw carved names and dates of previous explorers in earlier years grooved into the steps of the Royal Mausoleum. Yet everyone, Peru's Ministerio de Cultura, certainly Bingham, clearly the vandalizing explorers, and the even earlier graverobbers, want it to belong to them alone. Feel entitled to that. In truth it belongs to none of us beyond a temporary guardianship. Caretakers for a lifetime, or a generation, or a few minutes if we wake early enough. But no matter what timeline or duration, that palpable arrogance will inevitably melt away, leaving only the endangered constant of the rocks and the mountains that surround it. 

Sunday, May 24, 2015

My head is an animal.


"Yet modernity also gives us the self-questioning and self-doubting consciousness that permits us to understand that we lose something in its attainment." - Alastair Bonnett

“There’s a place I go to, where no one knows me,
It’s not lonely; it’s a necessary thing.
It’s a place I made up, to find out what I’m made of […]
Take me on to the place where one reviews life’s mystery.” – Matt Simmons


I’m drinking hot water with leaves torn and steeped for the alkaloid they secrete, trying to keep myself from vomiting. To prevent my brain from pulsating, my eyes from racking to blur. I’m drinking this because I’m higher than I’ve ever been. 11,150 feet above sea level, and throw in an extra 15 because the tea and I are on a second-floor balcony looking out on the Plaza de Armas, watching the peddlers of Cusco approach tourists with leather portfolios of bad paintings, or baby lambs in their costumed arms, coaxing the white faces first for photographs and then soles.

In truth, the mate de coca is overkill. At this point I’m on my third day of acetazolamide, a drug usually reserved for epileptics, but that currently is helping me prevent altitude sickness, both a literal and symbolic measurement of how dramatic a change being here is. Seven hours after landing in South America, I’m grounded but unmoored. Back in my familiar if not quite comfortable enclave away from time constraints, deadlines, unwanted appointments. Separated from the forced diplomacy of everyday life. With the drugs in my body, vomiting isn't a dominant worry, but there's a mental cloudiness mirroring the Peruvian sky I'm so close to that's gauzing up my brain. It could derive from the elevation change, or my only sleep coming during a red-eye flight, or just the shock of finally being here and the early stages of disconnect that that entails.

On this trip I go even further away from everyday routine than normal. Whether a response to how stressful my work life has become or to prove an ideal to myself, I’ve decided to go totally dark on social media during my trip. And aside from a small handful of necessary emails to loved ones, I’m entirely off-the-grid. I don’t check the news and the only headlines I see are the shouting Spanish print of tabloids I walk by on the city's narrow sidewalks. A life simpler and just as fulfilling as ours existed before the one of wifi hotspots and status as measured by Instagram likes that we know now and I want to experience it, if only for a week. Visit it for the fleeting solace it offers, experience a destination by totally immersing within it and cutting the safety cords of Facetime and iMessage to the world that I departed from. And prove to myself the lack of repercussions this choice actually has. 

The same rejection of modernity includes credit cards. I withdraw as many soles as I can from an ATM in the Plazeta San Blas and carry in my pocket the crumpled browns and greens and blues, learn to differentiate between the 2 soles and 5 soles coins just by feel. Like always, I'm confused by the tourists around me clinging to spending American dollars, running their sterile credit cards at every opportunity. Money exists only as an artifice, so why rob oneself of the sole experience of living on this exotic currency? Why sacrifice honest contact for the hollow pursuit of convenience?

There's a clear pattern of isolation in these thoughts, a bizarre focus on the negative to accentuate the inverse. And the contributing factors may be the elevation, the sleep deprivation, or the released alkaloids taking hold in my body. But the musings are faithful to my experience of South America, a land shaped for me by Gabriel García Márquez, and his intertwined triumvirate of life's experience: solitude, melancholy, and nostalgia. The inexorable emotional themes that will weave throughout our lives, if not telling the main narrative, then filling in the gaps of subplots told through whispers. The quieter times unseen and barely'spoken that belong by definition to us alone, though they are universally experienced. For so much of its history, this stretching continent has been a land removed, populated by a people in isolation. And its solitude has spawned an intrinsic tendency to internalize this experience. To at times seek company, but also to savor the role of detachment, to view it as therapeutic. Not all discontent is unhappiness. Some of it is introspection. 

And my current meditation, with these cups of steeped coca leaves, is that we're likely witnessing the death of something irreplaceable. That perspective is becoming a casualty in the modern world. 

We are the fulcrum generation. The aging Rubicon of humanity that remembers a life before technology devoured us in the name of convenience, but now reliant upon smartphones and social media and forms of communication so easy that constant participation in them seems requisite. I’m a contrarian, and a hypocritical one at that. I have no problem using my DSLR camera, its seemingly infinite capacity, shooting on memory cards, perhaps cheapening the photos as individual frames. But I’ve also held negatives down in trays of developer and stop bath, a dim red light above me, breathing the chemicals that rose up. I bring you these thoughts via technology, and you’re seeing these words on a screen, a compound of LED and RAM or LTE on your smartphone, but they were birthed longhand with pen onto paper. The words mean something to me, the scratchouts between these faint blue lines that you'll never see tell a story far more comprehensive and honest than the backspace button pushing thoughts back into the ether. 

And something of that earlier life and its nuance must remain if we're to retain our perspective. Shortcuts can exist as long as we retain the comprehensive maps of what's being glossed over. What rigors we've chosen to circumvent. And we must reserve the freedom to sometimes take those scenic routes, the longhand essays, the paper money with which we relearn to count and multiply with each change in borders and currency, the ability to unplug and then breathe deeply, and to do so with an air of melancholy. For the love of nostalgia.

Beyond Garcia Marquez's influence, there's additional precedent for focusing on the inverse. One native to not merely South America, but specifically Peru. Seven centuries ago, the Incas worshiped the sun, and patterned their geography and their lives around the precise movement of the heavens. On what they were able to see when the gauziness above pulled away. They mapped constellations, but not by assuming a connection between stars like their unknown contemporaries in the north or in Europe, tying light to light to create a fragile'framed bull or ram. Instead the Incas processed the darkness. They sought the void among the illumination in the night sky, creating fully formed bodies of its sacred animals with the massive gaps between stars. A llama, a fox, a snake not born of starlight, but birthed by the lack thereof.

Such darkness serves as a map. Not as a construct of the unknown or the negative, but of the forgotten. The antiquated way of doing things that still holds charm to those unafraid to stare into it and seek its patterns. Rediscover its mysteries when we manage to resurrect perspective.

Five mornings after landing back in New York, my return to sea level and what that entails, I was up early vomiting. My head throbbing with a hangover, vision blurred by the accompanying tears. The immediate cause was the combination of too many drinks with not enough food the night before. My motivation for consuming them stemming from a near'week of frustration; my uneasy return back to the machinations of the modern world. It was over in 45 seconds, but for the first time in these 5 days, I felt like I was fully back mentally. Re-ingratiated into the world I'd temporarily but successfully stepped away from. And in its own way, it was reassuring to know that my deepest sickness comes not from immersion in the unknown and authentic, not the climb to lofty altitudes, but in the inevitable descent that follows.