Allin Punchay

A good day

It's Sunday coming on sundown, and there are six men, one field over, behind three pair bulls, tilling with hand-carved wooden plows. Further up in the hills they're doing the same thing without animals, using chaqitacllas, wooden foot plows, same as the Inkas did.

It feels good to watch them and noodle on the guitar, it has been a tough few days. They are working their fields on a Sunday but I don't think they take that amiss.

They're about to plant maiz, what we call corn and natives call sara. It come in all colors and, in the hills, is grown without chemicals of any kind. Likely enough that field there. Monsanto will probably come by to sue them pretty soon. 

The field belongs to my landlady, Ricardina's, aunt. Yesterday her man, Ivan, also pure blood of the land, took me on a long hike on Bandolista mountain to the ruins at Pumamarka, a profound and mysterious pre-inca site. I'd heard of it, seen it on Googlemaps satview, but was amazed at its reality. I won't try to describe it. The web had nothing to offer but stub paragraphs and tourist reviews; I'd really like to debrief some Andeanist on that.

Afterward Ricardina met us at his Co-Mother's place back up the valley - he and she, the co-madre, are god parents to the same boy - ate trout and mixed veggies also from further back in the mountains in Huilloq, where the people dress to live in clothes I had thought were costumes for tourists. They don't give a fart about tourists, they farm for a living. And, well, sell some of those brilliant red ponchos to support their school.

We carried off a heavy sack of short, black, cobs of corn for Ricardina to cook to mush on an open fire in the back yard. They have cell phones and TV and the appurtenances of a modern kitchen but that's still how she renders her corn.

Okay. For a minute there I thought I wasn't going to make it here. It looked like the jaws of the beast called A Foreign Land were going to bite down on me. There was this interlinked crossfire of failures with my cell, internet, and banks - I couldn't call my banks because my cell wouldn't get international service, I couldn't communicate with the banks or the internet/cell carrier because my internet went dark, and both my debit cards went bad on me - one ate by the ATM, one refused my PIN. And I needed all of those to get my medical plan changed to work out-of-country. And it was cold dark and wet.

In Communist Avocado (out of contact) in a land where you don't speak the language worth a damn, and your money is all some thousands of miles away. Is how it felt.

Took a few days but it looks like that's all worked out. Shows you how prey you are to circumstance though, as an expat. Your support system is more vulnerable. I thought I might have to bail, and there are a lot of things yet to do and places yet to go. Anyway, I like this town. A lot.

Tunupa

The Colcas

Christ for a napalm strike. Whoomp, no more chapel, no more fiesta of the Virgen de Copacabana, no more hybrid Andean-Mexican racket. Third night in a row, sounds like its coming from the yard below, really, I thought it was for the first few hours. But it's from Bandolista, on the hillside pointed directly at me from about two hundred meters across the fields. Are the residents of that place all in it together, or do some of them pray for F-14s to burn that place into eternal silence?

You never know from whence cometh the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Usually, though, the snake's not this big; but then, most gardens aren't this Edenic, either. 

Bandolista from Pumamarka Wasi

It was still a pretty good day though - I climbed the path up onto the southeast face of Apu Pinkyulluna thinking maybe I'd make up the old Inka storehouses, the colcas, that I was told are called Tunupa. I'd gone that way before, in December, but chickened out at a narrow place in the trail. I have fear of heights. This time I got past that, up to the first little set of ruins, but above that the trail bottlenecked into a just about imperceptible track up onto the ragged black rock and low cactus. "Another day," I told myself.

I got my first acrophobia on a mountainside in the Washington Cascades in maybe 1972. I was sitting on this bulge of rock looking into a gorge when of a sudden I got this rush of sensation that I was going to just pop off that stone into the void. And I was going to do it on purpose. Panic struck and I gingerly backed off onto a safe trail.

So you get this panic sometimes, on, say, a roof. If it was set on the ground you wouldn't worry about sliding off, because the physics says you wouldn't. But there's some impulse inside you that you just don't trust. 

It's irrational, a sickness. Other people, whole families, just bound up those trails - hell, right there a guy with his wife and a baby on his back went by like they were in their living room.

But the trick to that is, get accustomed to it. Get used to it, that's all. I figured that would more or less work maybe in a few months if I kept at it. Because there are signs that it does work.

So I go back down the trail, and I am a little less skittish; and come to a fork going up to another set of wrecked stone buildings, I've been there before, I'm not tired, so I go up that way, not, when in motion, looking down, according to prescribed SOPs in mountain hiking, and I find I'm a little more comfortable. This ruin has a bunch of stone derelicts going up the mountain, linked by dirt paths, sometimes with scree, sometimes broken rock, often nice smooth dirt. I keep going up, past where I was last time, happy that the flashes of panic have gone away, that I can do it, by gosh, and get up past the ruins to where people have built little cairns, apachitas, stacks of rock to show you've got to where you're going, or that you've passed a peak. Fine, enough for me, now to go back down.

But I notice a trail going across the sheer face of the mountain and around a curve, in the direction of Tunupa. It's a good, flat, solid trail, and it might go there. I'll give it a try, to the curve at least. 

It goes there; at the end, it drops fast through rough rock, but I can handle it - earlier in the day it would have stopped me, but I am becoming accustomed. I get to Tunupa - really fine structures, good Inka work, scientifically designed to channel wind-flow, handle temperature extremes, foul weather, and preserve the contents for future use - the wind flow was tested by Jean Pierre Protzen with interesting results. 

I get there, check it out, take that low road that scared me earlier back down. Had to hunker down some on that bottleneck, but no panic. 

Didn't have to wait for another day. That was good. Got over a hump with the fear of heights. That was better. The rest of the day was pretty good too. Until this hell from across the valley.

9:45 and they're not done yet. Can't read, can't focus on pirated tv episodes, can't pound on the floor or go downstairs confront the perps, it's beyond my control, it's a whole town.

But wait: silence? Is it over? Is it too much to hope? Is there a ten o'clock cutoff?

Ahhhh. But they've done this before tonight; gone quiet for a minute or so, then come back louder than before. 

10:07 - it's kind of over. Now just some dude noodling an electric bass into the mike, but more muffled. Like everybody's left the party but these two or three drunks still muttering at each other. Just a .22 behind one ear each, tap tap tap, and it'd be okay. Peace.

10:14. Fuck. It's back in force. On a Tuesday night.

10:40. Stoic hate. It's all I've got. This will pass, but getting past that panic, that'll last.

It went quiet at 1:30 am.

Wasiy

It is August of 2014, and I have a house in Ollantaytambo.The lease is a year. I have a Peruvian cell phone and internet carrier, Claro, and have met a bunch of people, one two of whom have the potential to become actual friends. The place envelopes me, it is interesting, impressive, beautiful - screw looking up synonyms - and the people are kind. The basic food is  quinoa soup, chicken, rice, potato. There are variations, and it's all fine with me, I can happily live on this, interleaved with this and that now and then. I breakfast on bread rolls and "fresh milk" that comes in a box. I like it. 

My house (wasiy) is a little over a click from the center of town, has two floors, two bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, a dining room, and a big covered deck, a balcón. It runs $250 US per month. The hot shower isn't so hot so far and may never be, but heck, we're not in Vacaville anymore, Toto. It has electricity and fast internet. A mountain river runs by across the camino.

About three years back in Berkeley I composed a desiderata of what I wanted in a place to live; true dark, silence, living water, stars, and a dirt road to run on. Now I have them all. And Inkas, Inkas up the waz, Jack.

I checked out of Hotel California and of US. Maybe to return, but not for a while; not until I know what it's like to be planted somewhere else. I did it. 

I'm not bored, I'm not angry, I'm not afraid, not of much; I look forward to every morning. 

I've outlived most of my enemies

I've outrun much of my misery

I've outgrown some of my stupidity

Mary you should'a stayed

That's a song  that came to me a few months ago, came to stay.

That peak in the pic is Pinkyulluna; the locals call it Apu Pinkyulluna; Apu means Lord. The photo is taken from Apu Bandolista, on which the main ruins reside, Temple Hill. I met a man who has worked twenty years "restoring" Inka sites for the National Institute of Culture, or Instituto de Cultura Nacional, or INC, pronounced as E-NSA. He says there are, I think, 28 official Archeological Zones in Ollantaytambo, more than two hundred separate sites. He has a daughter who is an accredited archaeologist, also working for the INC. They offer to squire me around some of these places, show me what's real and what's not. I think I'll take them up on it when they finish working on their new apartment building in a couple weeks. I'd sure like to know.

The escarpment to the right is three distinct Apus along its length. It took me ten days and a few interrogations to find them out and verify, but I did. 

Now I know I'm not all that likable past a point, being a know-it-all, showoff, elitist, egoist, and whatever you're thinking that I don't know about, but I know some Quechua (Runasimi) words and I really like the Incas, and people around here appreciate that, so my long isolation has melted away somewhat. Here people live mostly in houses sharing walls on both sides, in extended families, and in a town of 2000, know one another at least by sight, so one of the first things they ask is, do you have a wife? Kids? Family? And when they find out I don't, it fascinates them. They call it "solito," and they use the word a lot around me. A day or two ago I was in a room with three women none of whom gave the impression of being especially literate, so when they asked me yet again if I was really single, I said, "Soy más solito que Gabriel Marquez." More alone than Gabriel Marquez. They all laughed, no pause. He wrote A Hundred Years of Solitude."

It's Sunday. The landlady, Ricardina, invited me to lunch today with some of her amigas, girlfriends. I thought maybe she was matchmaking, but no, it was a family/good friends get-together to which I was courteously invited. There was a lot of food. I shouldn't have had that second bowl of soup, I didn't know there was so much more coming, but I did my plate fair justice. Sure won't go out for Cena tonight though.

Now they are downstairs being fairly loud - it's only 5:52 so I'm not worried, they'll pipe down by eight - and playing Andean music, pitched so high it seems almost Chinese. They are good people. One, the patriarch of the gathering, is a Quechua first-language native of many generations; I asked, six centuries? Which would take you back to founding of this town by Pachacuti Inka, the most awesome of all the Inkas - don't laugh, he'd make you piss your pants with a glance - and he said, possibly. And it is possible. Not a hair on his chin, he's all indio.

He gave to me an Inka greeting which I'd once heard but failed to record, it goes:

Ama suhua
Ama llulla
Ama quellu
Jinullutag Q'ampus

I won't rob you
I won't lie to you
I won't be lazy
You do the same

And you know what? The way the Inkas lived, they could do it.

Someday maybe I'll tell you about Katty, KAH-tee. She runs the hostal, Chaska Wasi, at which I landed, and finessed me into this house; many expats have left this town unable to find a place to set up. And she won't lie to you (though things'll take a little longer than her optimism allows), she won't rob you (no qualification), she won't be lazy (no qualification). You...well, do what you want to do.

I'm the highest red roof in the left center. That's Apu Pinkyulluna behind.