Peru: Bribery
My first written piece from Peru is on my website now.
I’m using this trip as a springboard to write again.
I made a mistake before I went on the trip, and that was that I decided the trip should matter, rather, I thought I knew how the ending would feel before I even left.
That was cute.
Now I’m unspooling the lessons I actually learned, and the first thing I wrote out of the morass ended up a piece of writing about writing.
It’s not that good, but I also hope it’s not that bad.
I want badly to write about this trip. At length.
Last night, after four days on the Inca Trail, my duffel and backpack hit the floor almost as soon as the door to my room swung open. They were chased by my clothes as I peeled off my several-days-worn pants and shirt in an unbroken stride to the shower.
The shower wasn’t the piping-hot amenity I had been promised in booking this hostel. The best that could be said was that the water coming from the shower head was slightly warmer than the surrounding air. But it was more than sufficient to scrub away the four unique odors steaming from different sectors of my carcass. Shortly after, the contents of my bags were scattered around the far side of my room as I dug for that last, sacred pair of clean underwear.
Four days isn’t a lot of time, but the human ability to pivot and scale the desired level of comfort to the outer edge of one’s attainable level of comfort, is fascinating.
On the trail, a bowl of warm water, dispensed from a tea kettle heated by an open flame, is the height of luxury at the end of a long day. I didn’t mind wearing the same clothes over again through rain and humidity… and any further discomforts were grinned off as part of the experience.
After four days of living as a drowned rat, sleeping in a tent in the Andes, I was back in Cusco. Simply re-entering a city was enough to make me aware of the phantom backpack throb in my back and shoulders, as well as the fungal pong coming from the wet socks sealed inside my waxed leather boots. I immediately wanted to be clean and dry. I wanted to order a hot sandwich and a cold beer in a climate-controlled building.
What a difference 24 hours and some walls make.
We are strange, silly animals.
After the aforementioned shower, I ended up ordering the dozy comfort of hot chocolate instead of the cold snap of a fresh beer… but I did have that sandwich.
I had a good sleep. I spent the next day–today–tying up some loose ends around the city, editing photos at my friends’ more-spacious AirBNB, and now I’m back here.
Cross-legged on a bed, in a formerly-tidy room.
Trying to make sense of the last week.
I want so badly to write about this trip. At length.
But it’s not going to be easy.
“Miniver Cheevy, born too late,” there is little anyone can offer in the travel writing space that hasn’t been done a hundred times.
I’ve gone on record saying that I create because I have no choice. Whether the final photos or words are good, bad, for the public or just for me, my sanity depends on my expelling enough ideas from my dome so that I can sleep at night. The fact that I get paid to take photos for a living is incidental: I would make images regardless.
That urge to write my thoughts is no less prevalent now. And I want very badly for them to have some kind of impact beyond “here’s what I did on winter vacation.”
To compound the problem: I wanted this trip to matter.
I waited sixteen years to make this trek. I built it up in my mind as a marriage of phsyical, mental and spiritual effort.
In that spirit, I made the mistake I caution others against: assuming the outcome. Anticipating a kind of ending.
This trip did matter. This trip does matter. But not in the ways I expected, and I can already tell it will be harder to put into words than any trip I’ve taken before. My eagerness to write my impressions is in open war with the need to be deliberate with my words.
There are just too many thoughts to unspool.
I visualize my mind as an unsettled ocean floor, and I must wait for the cloud of sediment to settle. The settling is not just through gravity, but also through the pre-existing current.
I’m still too close to the experience to see clearly.
“The slow blade penetrates the shield,” and I know that Patience is the only cure.
But the urge to write still frustrates my anxious mind, so I try to coax a few coherent thoughts out into the light.
Even if I’m not expressing them aloud, I’m never short on thoughts. On any given day, I can be lockjaw silent or a shit-talking motor-mouth. Either way, the thoughts are nonstop.
But my thoughts, because they come from me, are stubborn like me. Sometimes my ideas want to feel like their own idea, and they resist translation on command.
That’s when I bribe them. Usually with alcohol.
I like it, so they do too.
Tonight is no exception.
Ballantine’s Blended isn’t my first choice to draw some words out of the ethereal somewhere, but I’m not at home, and I work with whatever familiar label the small shop nearest my place in Cusco has in stock.
Lest the above be interpreted as a complaint, I never complain about a bottle acquired for roughly $10.
The first pour went down easy, then I felt it land.
Scotch hits harder at 10,000 feet.
And thank God for it; I’ll take all the help I can get.
I sip and I type and I sip and I type and I refill and I type and I find that sweet spot where the room is still steady, but the words on my laptop screen dance a little.
The impacted thoughts begin, ever so slightly, to shift.
