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