Munay

I lent out my spare room to two 30-year-old gynecoids a few days ago because I'd been admiring their mud-spattered gear-festooned motorbikes the day before (not knowing whose), and then they showed up a few meters from my gate, DRZ400's chugging, asking about hostels. They're riding from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. They're friendly, and we've been kicking around the last few days when they weren't off somewhere else, doing active stuff and talking our heads off - they both like to talk and we have affinity.

They impress me a lot, for more than a few reasons, and our Venn diagram has a lot of overlap, but I'll be relieved when they go because, although a 38-year age differential makes it ethically and practically infeasible to make a move on either of them, I haven't outgrown desire. They have a very slick video blog so I can follow their further adventures. I'd like to be them for a week, either or both, and I kinda was for a minute there.

motoventuring.com

One outcome of this is that I've signed up with a web service called Couchsurfing in which you offer free lodging to trekkers, and can request it when you travel. I've minimally furnished the other room with foam mattress and electric shower, so if you're passing through, there it is. If we don't hit it off, no loss, you can have your room and I have mine. 

Couchsurfing

Panacakuna

Ruling Houses
























The Peruvians enjoy the hell out of their elections - they pile into convoys of honking, shouting, flag-waving trucks and vans, chanting and honking to the rhythms of the drums, jamming the traffic through town into the night. I think it went on for six weeks or more. Nine political parties in Ollantaytambo and even the ones that didn't have a chance looked fully funded and fully manned, their laughing yelling columns of mechanized cavalry circling the plaza then streaming out of town while other partidos blocked them coming back in. And rallies, in the plaza, in the open-air amphitheater a couple blocks from town, rabble rousers on the stands emoting to their demographic, red alpaca ponchos, skirts and hats from back hills, soccer jackets and trucker hats from town; banners flying, free food and beer.

The Incas gave their people a hundred days a year off, dressed as Raymis, religious festivals, with glittering spectaculars and strong drink, and these people still expect the same, however the fiestas may be disguised. That was called Ayni, reciprocity; on the macro level, the state gave back to people some of what it took in taxes, and taxes were labor.

My landpeople were for Tierra y Libertad, Land and Liberty, under the banner of a green mountain, running Elvis Flores for Mayor. They hosted one major gathering with free food and drink into the dark, and three long lunches in their yard. It was their turn. The oldest daughter, Flora the archaeologist, took the month off to campaign for them.

I should have taken photos of those parades of trucks and cars, recorded the chanting INKA! INKA! INKA PACHACUTEQ! I guess I didn't think it needed recording. I just got shots of the aftermath.

I think that's how they look at their electoral process. You won't see that anywhere north of the Equator and probably nowhere else south of the line, outside of the old Inka domain. Just as the new Church has to integrate the old rituals to stay alive down here, so the right of the people to their Raymis surfaces with every election.

Tierra y Libertad won, and Flora will beginning in January serve as a regocida, a councilor, third down from Elvis, the Alcalde himself.

ñawpa pacha

The Ancient World

Chakana

Every spring, to our little country school, there came a day when we knew it was time to bring out the marbles and play the game we seemed to know in our blood. It had always been that way, back to the days of horses and hoops.

Years later my sister, three grades ahead, told me that one day a couple of students, maybe in Education, from the state university came by and taught the school kids how to play that game. All in Ike's administration. I learned a lot about origin myths from that.

There is a thing happening around here that bugs me. It is called the "Chakana." It is a motif that occurs now and then in Andean art, mostly in textiles and pottery of the Pre-Inka Ica and Wari peoples, which has been co-opted, squirted with a lot of totally made-up new age horse pucky, and fed to the tourists and the people of Perú itself as "ancient spiritual wisdom." This has made money for some writers, and a lot more for purveyors of trinkets.

It bothers me because it is just not true. The Inkas and their predecessors had their own deeply rooted, complex culture and this "chakana" bit is no part of it. 

But it took off like wildfire, and it is everywhere now - on Amazon dot Com, in the markets, all over the web. the descendants of the ancient peoples don't even seem to know that it is bullshit. 

Someday, if there are archaeological anthropologists a thousand years from now, it might not be. It will have become real. Heck, it's real now; it's just not real Andean history.

And do you know where the source language comes from that is copied all over the web? Wikipedia. It bothered me too that Wikipedia let itself become an outhouse for charlatans. 

So I counterattacked by editing the Wikipedia article "Chakana," and was immediately slapped down. One of the wikigods took my edit down; I put it back up, I got a notice on my Talk Page that I was in danger of being blocked for engaging in an edit war. My work violated Wikipedia standards because it lacked citations.

So, months later, after gathering data here and there in the interim, I put up a "controversy" section and sat back waiting to be chastised. But, days go by and it stands untouched. Maybe it made the grade. And now when someone comes to Wikipedia to see what it all means, there will be another voice.

I'm just going to link to the article: too long-winded otherwise. My contribution follows under the heading "Controversy."  Chakana: Wikipedia

Method of Construction

In truth, I would have liked to have kept it short and punchy , but this had to be documented up the waz to stay up there, and I'm still surprised that it stands unbattered. But as long as it does, when the world comes to Wikipedia's door to pick up some gospel, they are going to get some accuracy with it.

Note:

The question to put to them is, all these declarations you impute to that simple motif, how do you know? Who told you? If you have some oracle stashed away in the hills for that one sign, what can you do for all the other symbols, found, for instance, on the Dumbarton Oaks Unku - the Inka tunic showing rows of repeating tocapu, abstract geometrical forms that some Andeanists speculate to be logographic, word-pictures? Can you impose whole ideologies onto these as well? We'd like some insight!

Dumbarton Oaks Unku

Allin Pacha - A good place to be now; a good time to be here

Pacha means place; and it means time. You can't express time without expressing place, and the other way around. If you say "here," you are saying "now." The Inkas were a naturally Einsteinian people.

Simapukiu andenes over the Urubamba river

This is a good time to be here. The ruins aren't ruined yet, the population, both local and touristic, is manageable, and there are many untouched curves and corners to explore.

Stone roof gable of a two-room house that turned up on a trail in my little settlement - thick walls, imposing presence, unanticipated

Machu Picchu is a mess; when I saw it in 2000 you could carry your own pack up the Inca Trail and explore the place to your heart's content from dawn to dark. Now you must by law contract bearers to carry your gear and guides to take you through the ruins, and the guides must follow a specific itinerary and timeline - keep moving, don't dawdle, there are people stacked up behind you. This year June saw around three hundred thousand visitors to Mack Pick. And even fourteen years ago there were few sections of the site that hadn't been airbrushed by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. I saw pref-fabricated stone gables sitting inside buildings waiting to be glued on top. There is at least one significant structure I suspect they made up out of their inflamed imaginations; I saw Bingham's original photographs and drawings and nothing stood there but traces of foundation.

Original andenes on the town side of the river - walking these I ran into two surprise Inka structures

Here, though, the INC has left a lot of the toured ruins still untouched - I am still trying to learn how to distinguish, but some places are obvious. They cannot yet begin to duplicate the serious imperial stonework. But someday they will.

Between the andenes and the river someone is constructing something along the railroad - now I know where those trucks that are extracting stone from the foot of Apu Pinkuylluna are going with it

In their defense, they are trying to keep the old buildings from falling apart. When they tackle a wall that is in danger of collapse, they number the stones in white, diagram and probably photograph the original, then take the stones down section by section and put them back up in a matrix of argillaceous mud mixed with grass fibers and maybe sometimes animal hairs, as did the Inkas; that clay mud will harden to be waterproof and last for centuries. The modern Peruvians are trying to restore with as much authenticity as they can. Give them that. But when they are finished what you are looking at isn't Inka; it is like Inka.

The Inca Bridge, modern engineering on the massive old Inca pylons, leads to trail to the Simapukiu andenes and the Katchiqhata quarries

I love to gaze at, walk beside, feel, the real stuff; to picture the workers putting one stone on another six hundred years ago. So see the original insect-pocked mud mortar. And I can, it is all over Ollantaytambo. In the last week I have stumbled on three small ruins unexpectedly, old stone houses that don't show up in any published scholarly work (I can't speak to, like, doctoral dissertations), on any tour, on Flickr - beautiful sturdy structures still standing as they did when they were abandoned. 

 View into the hills from the onset of the Simapukiu andenes

Today I walked alongside the andenes (terraces, pata-pata) of Simapukiu on the other side of the Urubamba river - tier after tier of great beetling civil engineering, dark, crumbling, hulking, full of the old Inka voices, you could almost hear them groaning...still farmed, untouched. 

The ramp from the back of Temple Hill to the quarries - often Inka construction can be brooding, overbearing; even without political intent

And you can go up into the tourist ruins - Temple Hill - all by yourself, you don't need a handler with you. You can lie to yourself, you don't need a guide to tell you there are images of llamas and pumas imbedded in the Six Monoliths (there aren't) or that they are made of granite (they're not). You can wander where thou wilt, lonely as a cloud, and as long as you stay inside the strings for your own protection (or the site's) no one will bother you. S70 ($24.40) for two days.

In a narrow neck between the terraces and the river is a small fort controlling access to the bridges, that I noticed for the first time a couple days ago. These stone stairs approach

Soon that will change. But Ollanta, as the locals call this town, isn't as concentrated as Mac, so there will be savory little surprises in the periphery for maybe a couple decades. But the Peruvian economy has been picking up for a while, and there is a lot building going on. It has been hard for an outsider to find a place to rent here for years, and now the landowners are accommodating for that by putting up apartments; I can see the roofs of two new complexes from here, and my current land-people are about to open eight new units just off the plaza. At least six are spoken for.

Try to sneak an army through this pass. One of the few defeats the Conquistadors suffered was their assault on Tambo

So I'm glad to be here now. And it is a good time to visit. The surround is beautiful and the people are good. Greed nibbles at the edges but the center is still soft and chewy.

That chance-enounter house in the country; small, but too well-constructed to be a farmer's cottage; maybe a chunkacamayoc lived here, responsible for ten households, or Pachakcamayoc, for a hundred

And when this place goes, so will go the best antiquities in South America, the Living Inka City. And we'll just have to light out for the territories. 

Vertigo

The Scene 
(Note: I've learned the names: Hatun is Colca P3, No-name is Colca P5)

In nineteen sixty-six I applied for a short job at the post office for the Christmas rush; didn't get it, math was weak. Afterward I dreamt that I was climbing a pillar of wobbly burger-shaped rocks and when I got almost to the top I got scared and didn't know how to get back down without toppling the whole mess onto myself. When at last I did inch back safely to earth, what a relief.

Back safely to earth meant not getting that job. Relieved from the fear of failure. That's a kind of vertigo: feeling like you've got yourself too far up some circumstantial tree. Psychological acrophobia, fear of heights. Here, in the mountains, I have the real thing. It first hit me on a bulging stone face in the Washington Cascades in my 30th year. Acrophobia. The locals call it miedo de pendiente, fear of dangling. I get scared before I get to the dangling part.

Up to Hatun (Colca P3)

So these hills I've been climbing - most of the sense of danger came from phobia, not from actual peril. But a phobia is supposed to be irrational. That's its job. And cure - well, I'm working on the theory that familiarity will wear it down.  Meanwhile, Fear Itself is scary.

Corona de Tunupa from Colca P3

Like acrophobia; that's what I have to be afraid of, going up those hills, not falling off. Fear makes it more likely that you will fall off. It saps your coordination and raises your center of gravity. Makes you lose balance. Sometimes - hell, often, when I think about it at all I think that fear is the worst single element in human life. Mine, anyway.

Up from Colca P3

But anyway, aller anfang ist schwer. All beginning is hard. And this is a beginning.

So one day I decide to climb to those row-houses, the storehouses that Jean Pierre Protzen, the Berkeley archaeologist who wrote the book on the sites in this town, called Colcas P, for Pinkuylluna, 3. 

Path to Colca P5

I get up to the first little square stone structure, P2, and above I see a rough slant of naked stone. No trail. My nerves start jangling and I get the first frisson of that wobbly-kneed wavering of vision that signals the onset of acrophobia.

Sitting in Colca P5

"Not today," I say to myself, "another time." But I don't want to slink off totally whupped, so I backtrack to a fork in the trail below, and go up to the colcas on the other side, the more elaborate colca p1 complex.

Dropping to the Corona Watchtower

I'm telling myself stories to walk myself through this; familiarity is the key. Don't look down. No, don't look down at first, but then do look down; you need to get used to this. Compare with reality. Study the ground; if this was two feet off the floor, would you fall off? (Probably not, if you weren't in a state of barely subdued panic; and if you were?) 

Going down you get to feeling salty

And sure enough, wending through alleys and corners of this complex I began to feel a little more comfortable. Shaky but better. I'd say, I'll turn around right up there; but would edge myself on just a little farther.

Until I found myself above the collections of golden-stoned storehouses, looking down. And just as I decided I'd done enough for today, I spied a path going off to west, vanishing around a curve toward the other side of the quedabra, toward the place I'd chickened out of earlier. But well above it.

Colca P1 Complex

And the path looked wide enough, solid enough, that I thought I just might be able to walk it. And I did, cautiously, and it came out above colca p3. There was a kind of precipitous drop there, path not so good, but I was too far into this now to cop out, and after all it wasn't so bad.

I made it. That day. And going back down, I got to feeling kind of salty. Put a little swagger in my walk. Few days later I went up the next level to P5.

It's a first step. I live here now. I will be doing this a lot. See that farther watchtower, that atalaya silhouetted way up against the sky? That looks impossible? Maybe it is. But not as impossible as it was half an hour ago.

Historical note: I went after that tower a week or so later, missed it, kept on going up crazier and crazier rocky spines, hoping to find it yet, and, fortified by three chaws of coca leaf, one stone outcrop above another, made the summit of the mountain. Far beyond any goal I would have set myself. The phobia's still there but it's a lot closer to rational.

Here's the guy you want to appease. Throw him a few coca leaves or a splash of drink. It's called an Oferta

Kusikawsay

Kusiawsay - the Good Life (Peaceful yet adventurous)

My first night in the new place and I am sad. The floors are cement, it feels like a jail; there is too much light outside at night, a bright light by the wall to this property and blinding guard lights from some building on the hill out the back window, a quarter kilometer off. There's no water. I miss the Pumamarka house, gorgeous views, the trees, the river, the looming presence of the peak Apu Pinkuylluna. I'm wondering if I've made a grave mistake.

Then I wake up in the night to a sliver moon in a mottled sky and I begin to put together a plan. There may be a story here.

Here's what happened. The deal when I moved into casa Pumamarka was that I'd share the downstairs level - kitchen, dining room, bathroom, guest room - with the Lopez-Huallpas, Señora Ricardina, Señor Ivan, for fifteen days, while they finished their new wing.

Twenty-five days passed and not much happened. They were still there, and I was getting skeptical that that concrete slab with its three foot high walls and no sign of water, gas, or electricity, would ever be a kitchen and dining room. I was losing trust - I suspected that their intentions were good but that they were re-thinking the situation and deep down would like to keep my first floor. My feeling for the place was becoming clouded and complicated.

I went back north to close up the Beavers Pond place, join an excursion to Nootka Sound with a pack of Captain Cook aficionados, and bring more stuff up here. Down here. Feels like up to me.

I was really hoping to find my lower floor cleared out when I got back, but no, instead they had moved in more personal stuff - gilded religious sculptures, a big rearing ceramic horse.

I wasn't too much in love with life right then; it looked like my luck was running out - I've always been lucky in a negative sort of way, bad things happen to other people but not to me; this trip though the airlines left one bag in Houston and another passenger took my carry-on and left theirs. My critical replacement ATM card, primary source of funds down here, turned out to be a debit card for which I had no pin. And American banks won't sent a new card or PIN information to Peru. And the 220 volt electricity fritzed the 120 volt table lamp I'd been looking forward to.

I talked with Señora R, she said they'd be out in a week; I said I'd give them to the end of September.

Then I went down to town, to Señora Alicia's little artisan shop - I'd bought a thick orange blanket from her once, I'm under it now, and she'd told me she had some rooms to rent a little ways off, east of town, in the shadow of the principal ruins on Bandolista hill.

The rooms were still there, for cheap; she showed them to me - a second story array, each with a bathroom, looking out over a long greenly gardened lawn with arch-gated wall at the far end. Views over the interesting San Isidro district to the western mountains, green fields and then the town to the east. I said I'd give it some thought.

The next time I talked to her, though,on impulse, I committed, then went back up and told Señora P that I'd be moving at the end of September. She took it pretty well, with this little window-wiping wave goodbye as punctuation. Later though, I felt a little sleazy; I've been forthright with all dealings here and kept my word perfectly, and I'd promised her the end of the month to complete her end.

So I've spent the last three days humping heavy loads down a rocky, muddy trail (currently being torn up by heavy machinery so someone can pull rock off the foot of the mountain. Apu Pinkuylluna isn't going to like that; two locals have told me theres an Inka cemetery buried there) through town, and over rocky dusty roads at the other end. Hard work but I could use to work off an ice cream binge.

Now I wake to that moon. The devil may be in the details (as far as I can see nobody in particular said that first) but I have some control over those details and they are not all bad, not at all.

Ramón came by about six thirty, worked for two hours getting the water going. Might even have a sort of hot shower. I got my bags back, minus the keyboard, and I've ordered another which Tom will ship to me - I mentioned that no online vendors will ship here? - and a superlative Capital One bank customer service agent named Devin talked another department into breaking protocol and giving me a temporary PIN over the phone; I have a working debit card. There are advantages to being near the center of Ollantaytambo, the view to the west is magnificent, and I'm back here, still here, glad to be here. And I may be able to redeem and even enhance this situation at the cost of only $244, and maybe not that.

So here's the story, with a character list to come, and introducing the Cautionary Gringa.

View to the west

Note: the following two posts were written later in the day, but are dated to be sequential for the sake of the story

Runakuna

Runakuna - the people

Katty (KAH-tee) Vargas Saire - owns the Chaska Wasi (Star House) hostal; thin, animated, gregarious, the goddess of Peru Time - if she gives you a time and date you know it won't happen then if at all. She arranged the Pumamarka house for me.

Ricardina Lopez Huallpa - owns the Pumamarka house; shrewd eyes, laughs a lot, if you joke she'll probably get it; rotund, around fifty, recently back from living in Argentina, where she met Ivan. Strong character. Huallpa means "chicken" in Quechua. She has 20, plus ducks.

Ivan - Ricardina's man, good natured, stout but strong, twenty years in the Peruvian army chasing the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas around the mountains but never killed anyone - he was a technician; rather sympathized with the Sendero because they were for the people. Pure blood Andean.

Alicia Teran Quispe - co-owner of the Bosque house in the San Isidro district, as well as a new apartment complex by the mercado and her artisan shop by plaza Manyaraki below the principal ruins. Lean, intelligent, friendly, tough. Two grown daughters and a young son. Quispe means "crystal."

Ramon Barriga Huaman - Alicia's man; wiry, somewhat taciturn, twenty years with the INCA, National Institute of Culture; they "restore" Inka ruins for the government. This requires a lot of construction with stone and mud, attention to detail, knowledge of Inka architecture, and hard labor. Huaman means "hawk."

Flora Barriga Huaman - Their oldest daughter, bespectacled, serious, university graduate, accredited archaeologist, works for the INC as an administrator but is taking the month off to volunteer with the Tierra y Libertad - Land and Liberty - party for the Ollantaytambo elections in October. 

Abelard Barriga Huaman - their son, looks about nine, acts older; dealt with our mototaxi driver with a man's authority. Won't brook condescension.

Alicia Quispe's younger daughter - around twenty, graduated from the U in Cusco in Tourism, has a year-old girl named Brianna.

David (Dah-VEED) - Katty's Italian boyfriend and employee at Chaska Wasi; came to Peru to escape a spiraling European economy; round-headed, genial, warm, maybe ten years younger than Katty, which seems to be a point of contention.

Alegria - the cautionary gringa.

Jorge (HOR-gay) or Tupaq Yupanqui - young street artist, Quechua first-language (as are most of these people), educated in art at the university in Arequipa, far the to the south; hangs out with the "jeepee" (hippy) street artists in Manyaraki a few yards from Alicia, who doesn't like them. Walks the streets hawking watercolors of cityscapes, a tough way to make a living. I eventually bought one because he taught me some Quechua; he claimed it was of Ollantaytambo though it clearly was not. He's listed because I run into him a lot and he may play some part. The whole hippy artist crew and I have a slightly uncomfortable friendly acquaintance. 

The Cautionary Gringa

I'm sitting on a wobbly rock in the middle of Plaza de Armas, deflated pack on my back, resting between runs, when in the corner of my right eye I spot a gringa approaching. She looks sort of german. No big deal, twenty times a day around here. Now here's what happens, almost subliminal, a little mental sub-routine:

 Shall we verb?

(Processing)

We shall not verb.

In a flash. Happening all over the world. I close my eyes again, brushed by the warm breeze. Then I hear,

"...cinqo soles..."  It's her, closer, slim, about my height, short light hair, standard silvery yoga mat rolled on her backpack. She switches to English, "Massage, five sols." I decline, turn back away. 

"That can't be comfortable." I look at her sort of smiling at me. What can't? Sitting on this rock? 

"It is if you do it long enough."

"(Something.)" 

Then I ask, "You mean sitting on my rocking rock?"

"I mean sitting with that back pack."

"It's okay, it's empty."

She nods, crosses the street and strikes up a conversation with a Peruvian woman on a park bench. 

That's when it occurs to me that five sols ($1.74) is a damn good deal for a massage, so I cross over, wait for a pause in their talk, say "five sols?"

I pick up her pack, give her mine. Hers is about twenty pounds. She resists but not much.

I pretty much blew the massage. It was head and neck, fifteen minutes, and I found myself talking all through it - asking questions or answering. It was a little disconcerting - I didn't know I was so starved for communication - what was it, the english or the girlish? One must immerse oneself in a massage. But she had a story to tell. It started with her saying she lives in Ollantaytambo. If she lives here, why the pack?

Turns out she's just out of a clinic for falling off a mountain; she'd been hiking and slipped. A few bruised bones. They shot her up with something that knocked her out then forgot to feed her - she was supposed to ask - and she didn't eat for four days. I guess she'd eaten since.

But what I wangled out of her eventually is that she is an itinerant masseuse. She doesn't really have a place here; tonight she was going to sleep in a campground nearby for S/.10. 

"The women here love me." She means the poorish women, who can afford her as a brief moment of luxury in their hard duty days. She has a lot of middle-aged female Quechua clients.

I get her to do the small of my back for another five; hit on her accent. "Texas?"

"Texas and Louisiana..." and I get a little biography. Nothing big; she's a "hippy at heart," been to most states but not California. How can you not get to California? She goes to Florida instead. I tell her Florida and Hawaii are the two states I've never seen. She's thinking of going to Brazil next, she's tired of the cold. I advise Colombia. She has wriggled her way down here through Mexico and Central America. She's forty years old.

She's rubbing my temples, says, "This is where the women ask me my name." I ask. It is Alegria.

She's going to Pisac at the other end of the valley tomorrow, because she's never been there.

She tells me that she had a job in a Cusco hotel, managing a kitchen, but quit because she wanted to see Machu Picchu. Not, to my eye or yours, enough reason.

After, we get some tea at a cheap restaurant on another side of the square; she wants black tea and is struggling to work that out with the proprietor. I intervene: "Mate negra." The guy lights up, so that's what she wants. For someone who works with the locals every day and has lived in several Latin American nations her Ess Pan Yol isn't that good. I also get her a sandwich. We've established that she's homeless and forty, and hippy at heart or not that's a hard row to hoe. 

Of course I'm processing her situation and what it means to me. I feel myself slipping into rescue mode on one hand and escape mode on the other. I'm watching for her to probe at my weak points. She knows that. 

She asks me what is my favorite memory. I say I don't have one, as soon as you institutionalize a memory you kill it (a sort of platitude I know), then I realize I DO have a favorite memory but before I can get it out, she's telling me hers and I see that is why she asked the question, so she could tell hers.

Alegria's favorite memory is sitting in a good chair with a cup of tea, reading.

You know, full disclosure, I don't recall whether I made my offer before we left the plaza or in the Coffee Tree at tea, but this is what I put out: 

"If you'd prefer it to the campground, I have a spare room downstairs where I live; it may be a little funny with the land people because I'm moving out, but I am paying for the place so you can stay there if you want. There's a wood floor, no bed, a bathroom."

The sequence doesn't really matter except that was after she accepted that offer that she said, "When we get there I can give you a real massage." 

I replied - and I had said it before - that I'd wait until the next time we met to really do justice to her massage. I didn't imagine that flash of disappointment.

I asked what she averaged in a day as a masseuse; she pondered, said about forty sols. I considered her lifestyle - the cheapest hostal she knows in town goes for S/.15; she knows the cheap eats. I said, "You can live on that."

We walked up the trail in the dark. It was fun. It was very dark and the dirt road had been taken out by a tractor/digger that day to widen the camino, and was it rough country. There was a narrow path left on the side and we walked that, trying not to fall off to the right. Actually, it wasn't much of a drop but we couldn't see that.

On that twenty minute (in the dark) walk we talked about some of her quasi-scientific theories - that topic had come and gone through the night - for instance, she had notes and sketches of Kufu's pyramid proposing that is a Helmholtz generator. We kicked it around, I wasn't persuaded, it sounded pretty new-age crap to me, but she did have some science, for a liberal arts dropout. 

She wasn't boring. But could get to be that way. Or go the other.

We got there, I asked Ivan if it was okay to move the spare bed down from my place, working together we did it by sliding it over the side of the open balcón. I gave her a pillow and some blankets and told her to knock on the door in the morning. 

In the morning she used my shower, I walked her to the gate, gave her S/. 20. She waved it away, saying, "We're good." I said "For your trip to Pisac." She took it. Actually, she did pretty much everything I told her to. Not everybody's like that.

I had been flip-flopping over whether to give her S/.20 or S/.100 - neither are that much. I asked her, "You had a job in Cusco? At a hotel?" She said she had had. "And they gave you a room?" They had. So I gave her the twenty.

She looked back at me a little doubtfully then, so I said, it just came out, "I won't be doing that much." She gave me over her shoulder a little smile of recognition.

Now the night before, as we got through the gate with my key I asked, "seriously, wanderlust or not, don't you wish you had a job and a house somewhere?" She answered, with a twist of you-fool annoyance,

"My favorite memory is sitting with a cup of tea. Of course I'd like to have a husband and house and a boring job somewhere."

I'd spent the night in and out of sleep worrying for her. She is forty years old living in a foreign land sleeping in campgrounds selling massages for a dollar seventy four cents and has no other prospects. I mean,

What if she wants to go home? What if she wants to get back to Louisiana?

She can't. 

She doesn't have the money.

And there is the nightmare of the expat, of the world traveller. What if you can't go home?

What if you end up as the cautionary gringo.

I had also spent the night arming myself against being the rescuer. She's not ready to be rescued. She has to get there herself. And soon. 

And I warned myself that when I see her again and get that head rub that I have already been seduced once against my inner sage by a very knowing head massage and not to succumb. Verbing can be risky. But here I am, solitary and horny and counting the days to inability, so if this post disappears one night you'll know what happened.

The Cautionary Gringa.