Ash and Small Bear go on an adventure!

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.