Filed under: Uncategorized
From 3/18/09
Yesterday we went to Machu Picchu on a blue train, four hours through the sacred valley to Aguas Calientes and then on foot up a very long stone staircase through bromeliad jungle and the paths of small black butterflies. By the end of the stairs, there are clouds below you, blurring the green of the valley as it stretches, catty in an endless supply of warm sunbeams, down to the fat brown writhing of the river and the toy blue trains winding their way back and forth along its bank. At the top of the staircase you wait in a (that day) short line, turn a corner, and then you see, nested carefully among the huge boulders of a flattened mountaintop with terraces falling through all degrees, the shocking tidiness of a tiny city. Rock handed down pre-assembled from divine mathematicians, and everything in its place – here the guard tower at the highest point, here the rooms for storage, the temples, the observatory. And in the center of it all there is a tree standing exuberant guard over the mountaintop, trunk crouched under an untameable mane of pink flowers and red leaves, last survivor of the human war against jungle that woke each wall from its centuries of rest.
I imagine the original inhabitants of the city probably spent most of their free time watching the clouds, which in the few hours of our wandering presented a fuge of variations on water, air and light. Bach, in his free time in the afterlife, conducts these clouds. They wrap around the mountain and drift away, disconsolate. Light shifts like arrows to buried treasure – from brightness, all at once, all is dark except a circle, there, spotlit… then the clouds scurry to their places at the sides of the stage and the sun washes everything back into carefree, mysteryless day. A cloud statue wakes up hungry, born from the breath of the trees, peels itself from the hillside and sinks sticky and exhausted into the valley.
Cusco rolls over its valley matching the hillsides contour for contour, cobbled streets barely wide enough for the little taxis so that, as they pass, you press yourself against warm stone walls to make room. In the plaza San Blas, a woman with a parrot on her shoulder is making jewelry, sitting in the sun with a pile of shells and hemp, laughing. The parrot is a startling green against her hair, and soft – he will nibble your fingers if you stroke his head, but not too hard.
The conquistadors, in the name of their god and of Spain, tore down the Inca temple in Cusco and used its stones to build the base of a great cathedral at the city center, marble arches and weeping saints and catacombs with names of priests carved into the dark of the walls, the altar plated with 12,000 kilos of silver. In the same city, now, there is a garden filled with hummingbirds and looming golden clouds, and it is beginning to rain – first the smell from far off of heat suddenly quenched, then the sound of muted applause, and finally the rain itself, suitably announced, turning every surface to a mirror that the sky might better admire herself. The clouds sigh and give themselves over to the earth, rain through mist illuminated hanging soft and layered as ferns from the wall of a cave, covering over the cathedral walls and the Inca stones beneath.
Left to the plants and the rain, how long until the echoes of human longing for divinity and power wash away downhill? And when the stone and silver belong again to the hills, whose gods will take up residence?
Anyplace that smells like flowers and comes with pineapple juice for breakfast gets my seal of approval.
Safe and sound… adventures to come.
Squickable Warning: (Noah, this means you). This post is about an operation. It was scary. There are details of the scariness. If you don’t like to see the word ‘blood’ or think about the thing it represents, you shouldn’t read this.
—
I watched my first operation – an emergency c-section in a hospital without running water, oxygen, blood or suction. The room was at least 100F, the only light from a bare fluorescent bulb hanging above the table. The anesthetist couldn’t stop shaking, the mother wouldn’t stop screaming, he tried four times to get a needle into her spine and, failing, put her under with a syringe of ketamine and a bottle of ether. While its familiar, solvent cabinet smell floated sticky and sweet over the room I stood back, trying not to get in the way (until the surgeon said ‘come over here, you can’t see anything from that far’), trying to imagine her dreams… falling asleep she kept talking to Jesus and with that much ketamine I wonder if she met him. So much blood. Everywhere. Dripping over the table, onto the floor, they ran out of towels to soak it up and had to squeeze out the old ones and use them again. In the face of such sharp knives, the woman seemed so fragile, and then there was a baby, blue and small and whole and strange, and one layer at a time the surgeon pieced its mother back together. Huge ugly nylon stitches to push the temporarily outside back in, and I realized my thoughts about fragility have been backwards all this time. The frightening thing is not the fragility of life, but its sheer unstoppable clawing abundance, the baby in the woman and the brutal, unglamorous sutures closing a gash that should have killed her, and the IV antibiotics because just for having the operation she was ‘already massively infected’, and outside life going on as it always had. I kept thinking ‘no one can live through this’, but… they did. They do. The woman lived. The child lived. We washed our hands and changed back into normal clothes and everything looked exactly the way it had before we went into the operating room and no one seemed to think it at all miraculous, what happened. A woman had a baby.
People make it alive to the end of every day. Millions of them.
Still in Kampala. Such a strange thing, asking new faces, new words, unwalked roads to fill in the spaces ordinarily occupied by home, lovers, friends, work. There are moments, bent double kneading the last traces of soap from my by now all-too-familiar little pile of laundry, where I want to set it all on fire and leave through the back door, pick a direction and start walking. To the airport. To Lake Victoria. Anywhere.
And how we sang in the kitchen last night! Washing nine kinds of starch and leftover greens off our stack of plates, until Vicky said No! I’ve gotta stop this before I go into the Spirit! It’s not fair to the Lord! He deserves to get some rest! Every sentence an exclamation as she told us not to talk about god anymore or we’d go mad, and it seemed like a real risk, three girls in the kitchen dancing and singing and telling stories without endings, red clay earth crawling in over everything. The rains haven’t started yet but every faucet in the whole house leaks to make up for it, out own private flood dripping from the bathrooms to the kitchen while mosquito noises pass back and forth electric picking up sparks from faraway thunderstorms. Every time I crush one between my hands I think the power might go out again.
Filed under: Uncategorized
In Kampala for a few days, then off to Soroti!
My new hobby is not getting malaria.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: africa, coming home, packing, snacks, travel
Wandering around this afternoon, putting things in order, I kept thinking ‘you know, it’s really important to have enough snacks.’ When wandering out into the unknown, take chocolate bars. The bag is almost packed again, just waiting for my swimsuit to dry, tomorrow lost to travel… and Friday I’ll wake up in Africa.
So.
Updates may be few or nonexistent for a little while, but! I’ll be in Seattle July 31 to August 10. We should hang out! There are bikes to ride, french toasts to eat, picnics to picnic, snuggles to snuggle, pies to bake, silly hats to wear, and all manner of other adventures to galumph into.
See you soon!
More cousins.
Conversing through a dictionary, every word gains the weight of the time it takes to translate it. Every sentence becomes so heavy, the simplest questions enough to crush you if you aren’t careful, until impatience and the heat drag everyone back into their own languages, save for the occasional important thought: ‘I met your aunt once - the one with the parrot.’ They want to know about second and third cousins of mine, people I haven’t seen or heard of since the last big family reunion when I was… how old? Seven, maybe, or eight, young enough to remember only the tiny crabs under rocks on the beach and the boy who wouldn’t swim with me, not until I called him a coward and splashed ahead so far he had to yell to tell me anything. I don’t remember who he was or where he came from. I remember, though – in the end, he swam.
And after everyone left and I retreated to my room to cover myself again with my own thoughts, Lenka brought me a picture of my auntie Mary, standing on a hillside, ‘1957′ printed at the top. In our shared language, part English, little Croatian, mostly gestures, she points to Mary and explains, ’see, we used to be thin like you. Now I am here and she is dead. You don’t know how your cousins are… but I care about these things, because I am a grandmother.’
