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.