Trans-continental

Tres Cruces, Peru.

Away

I am on a plane to Peru. I look down at Miami at night, and it looks like a giant constellation creature with lights pulsing through its veins. I convince myself that that is what it really is. I feel like something is about to happen to me.

Six hours later, I am on a quiet smaller plane, flying from Lima to Cusco. I am looking out the window at some suspended otherworld of a sunrise, the cloud line below thick and stretching out in all directions like it’s solid ground. A few mountains come above it, snow-capped. Everything is glowing soft sunrise colors dulled by the dusty window. The flight attendants give us tiny sweet muffins with chocolate chips. I am deliriously tired. I think, I am going to see the sunrise from a mountaintop above the clouds before I leave.

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I am on a bus. I am going to Quillabamba, a high jungle city 8 hours from Cusco. I hang out the window, taking photos. The road curves through the mountains. The sun is on my face. Everything is green. A woman in worn woven clothes on the side of the road holds up her cat as the bus passes. Friend is sitting next to me. We have a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly and a tent. I can’t stop, for hours, feeling like I am the happiest I have ever been in my life.

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I am in a restaurant near where we are staying in Cusco. The people who run it use the profits to fund their social project, a local school for children in poverty. There are clouds on the blue walls, brightly-colored toys and decorations everywhere, cushions on the floor, bookshelves. Some musicians are playing in the center of the room. A street boy is at one of the tables, drinking a milkshake. The owner of the restaurant is talking to him tenderly. I think, If this place didn’t exist he would be outside in the cold, dressed up in “typical clothing”, posing in tourist photos for change. The boy is smiling.

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I am on a bus to a place called Paucartambo. Friend is sitting next to me. We have decided to screw the drive-by tour of local ruins that our volunteer agency has set up for us to go to a festival we have heard is happening over the weekend. We have made no arrangements. When we get there, we discover after an exhaustive search that every hostel and extra room in the tiny town is full. People have set up tents in the Plaza de Armas and by the river, but we have no blankets, and the temperature is cold and falling. We see some flashing lights and a sign that says “Discoteca” and go inside to try our luck. Drunk campesino men crowd around us and I ask if anyone knows somewhere we can stay. One of them tells us we can sleep in his car, then spills his beer on himself. He tries to gives us his keys. We leave the bar. We do not know what we are going to do. Just outside a man comes up to us and says, “You need a place to stay?” He explains he has a friend who runs a lodge close to the town. We look at each other. He could be an angel or a demon. We follow him. He leads us away from the town, down a dirt road that becomes darker and darker. He tells us not to worry, that it’s a little far but it’s nice, very open, very free, and tomorrow we will see Carlos has reason. We agree that we really don’t care what kind of place it is, as long as he doesn’t pull a Comfort of Strangers on us. But he is the angel, and gives us hog and potatoes for breakfast in the morning.

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I am jolting through dust and eerie blackness, towards the sacred Tres Cruces where the last of the Andes melt into the rainforest, around snaking mountain bends in a crammed comvee with friend. We go to watch the sun rise. On clear days, we have been told, the humidity over the Amazon creates optical distortions like dancing suns, halos, jets of beautiful light. It is cloudy today. But still we’ve gotten ourselves up above the clouds with the sun rising and the rainforest passing beneath, flitting in and out like a dream. I drink hot chocolate and feel the electric cold and stare. People are silhouetted against the sky with the clouds stretching out below. It’s like looking down from heaven.

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I am walking in the woods in the mountains near Pisac with friend. I am suddenly struck by the surreal beauty of diagonal forests; the life force of the trees that grow in the Andes. The sun starts to set. We ride back to town through jungle valleys – the kind that make the breath catch in your throat - on the rails of a campesino truck. We are asked where we are from, how long we are staying, if we have seen the Machu Picchu. I almost fall off trying to balance operating my ancient film camera with holding onto the rails. The truck is overflowing with people like a clown car, and every time we pass the police everyone hisses “Policia!” and we all have to duck down. We are having a ball. I forget about the past and the future.

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Home

I am driving with the windows down in my mother-land Rhode Island after getting back from Peru. I am flooded with euphoria every time I look at the wild green forests of the East rushing by my car window with their bark faces and tangled tendrils. That deep sense of familiarity that made me feel bored and trapped here before is suddenly a precious thing.

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I am beginning to find magical places. Places I had unknowingly been very close to many times before, and would have found if I had looked around the corner or behind the fence. Not hidden per se, but guarded. Like a broken up overpass in the middle of a forest close to my house in Portsmouth. The stacks of huge cement rectangles make a walkway almost, an irregular elevated space with grass and small trees coming up through the gaps, a little surreal and innately comfortable, its existence probably the product of a chance decision to just dump the highway in the woods somewhere. I climb to the top of the tallest stack and hang my legs off the edge. I look at the sunshine coming through the trees onto the marsh that surrounds it. All this time, this was right here. And I know the world is infinite.

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It is everywhere I go now. It even comes in my sleep.

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A dream

I am drifting through a strange place on a boat somewhere in India. Trees come out of the water. There are small wooden shacks floating on square rafts with empty cabinets built onto their sides.  They look abandoned, but I am sure people live there. That thought makes me want to bow down before them. These people know the secrets of the earth. There are branches everywhere, there are mysterious things behind the tangles. I can hardly take it, it’s so sublime.

I never wake up.