Teacher on Two Wheels

Above: Looking down on where we started our hike. Aguas Calientes, Peru

Friday 9/5/08 Ayacucho, Peru

After two weeks spent traveling around Peru, after long bus rides and lots of walking, after museum visits and fantastic meals, after moments of frenzied talk and awe-inspired silence, my parents have left.

I’m not going to write about the hospital visits, the haggling with discriminating taxi drivers and street vendors who saw my older travel companions and assumed it was fair to charge us five times the going price, the two evil travel agents that nearly swallowed us whole, the hotels that weren’t as shiny as they were in their internet pictures, or the times in which we were too tired or sick or sore to speak at meals.

I don’t want to remember my parent’s trip for those types of things. I want to remember it for things like our four-hour hike up and down Putukusi Mountain.

Putukusi pokes up through the earth like a pointy stone elbow. The mountain is so jagged, so steep and unforgiving looking, that were it to have a temperament, it would surely be fierce, loose-tongued, and aggressive. It looms over the Urubamba River that meanders around its base. The mountain’s summit faces the east side of the Machu Picchu ruins. When we set out to hike the trail that zig-zags up Putukusi’s side like a zipper, we had no idea what we were in for.

“Are you crazy? What do we need two and a half liters of water for? Aren’t we just going for a short hike?” my dad asked as I bought a large bottle of water before we started the hike.

“I don’t mind carrying it. Plus, we need water. We don’t have any left in the hotel room,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him the guidebook said the hike would be 90 minutes long. I had the feeling he thought we were going for a tiny stroll.

We walked out of town along the train tracks, as the guy in the restaurant advised, and found the last hotel on the left. Sure enough, the trailhead was just off to the right, a tiny clearing that bled into a path through a tangle of tropical undergrowth. We started up a set of stone steps and were soon covered by moss blanketed trees. The air was cool and moist.

After about 20 minutes, a little out of breath with sweat on my brow, I turned back to my parents.

“You know, you guys can turn back whenever you want. Don’t push yourselves too hard,” I said, smiling.

“I feel OK, for now,” my mom said, panting.

“Yeah, I’m OK,” my dad agreed, leaning against a boulder for support.

Ten minutes later we reached the first ladder.

Like a vine that had been left to grow up toward the sun, the ladder shot its way straight up a sheer rock face. The climb was at least 120 feet tall. I couldn’t believe hikers were climbing such a thing without ropes and climbing equipment. It was the type of thing that, once seen, immediately left you guessing as to how many people had died trying to scale it. I looked down at the ground around my feet and searched for blood stains and bone bits.

Above: The scary ladder on the hike

Seeing the ladder got my parents excited. They, right then and there, decided to see the trail through to its end. Summit or bust.

I loved that.

I climbed up first. As per a fellow hiker’s advice, I tried not to look down as I climbed. It helped. Moving only once one hand had found its way to the next moist wooden rung on the ladder, I crept upward. At the top, I looked back down and almost gasped at the steepness of the thing. I took a few photos of my parents climbing up (just in case I needed to show their friends and family back home how they spent their final moments on Earth) and took long slugs of the water that was weighing heavy on my back.

We scaled five or six ladders as we climbed that day. Each one paled in comparison to the first, but each one lured my parents further and further toward the summit.

Eventually, after about two hours or so, the trail led us out onto a beautiful part of the mountain that was covered only in grasses and the odd orchid. The air got cooler and the views of the surrounding mountains became grander and more dream-like. With the sun pouring down through the afternoon clouds in thick bands of light, with trees seeming to defy gravity by perching themselves on the sheer rock faces of the surrounding mountains, the sacredness of the place swelled.

Above: Mom and dad taking a rest

When we finally huffed and puffed up the last switchback, we were greeted with a view that stilled us in our tracks. The ruins of Machu Picchu, in all their precarious glory, could be seen spread out on the spine of the mountains in front of us. Mountains continued as far as the eye could see and were shaded in different hues of green and brown in the afternoon light. All, even the ruins, had a permanence to it that made us feel small. It made rent, car payments, stress, and doubt seem like silly, frivolous things.

Above: Seed pods at dusk, me at the top of Putukusi

The waning light forced us to leave Putukusi’s summit after 45 minutes. Although the hike down was easier on our legs, it didn’t take long for our knees to begin aching. With only a quarter of the descent left, my mom started feeling as if her knees were about to give out with each step she took. As the afternoon faded into dusk, she began resting more often. The trail slowly slipped into the shadows; we felt for our footing and started walking cautiously.

Then something beautiful happened.

For the last thirty minutes of the hike, with little more than love as his guide, my father held my mother’s hand and helped her down the trail. They walked slowly, one step at a time, together. He gave her tips on how to keep weight off of her weak knee. He prevented her from falling. He warned her about steep parts in the trail ahead, sections barely visible now in the darkness of early night. As a team, they were able to do that which my mother couldn’t do alone.

After 28 years of marriage, my parent’s now share a love that helps them live—without it they’d be disoriented in their own bodies, lost among themselves. Like a faint, ever-present feeling, their love is as much a part of their natural make-up as their hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. When they are sick, the kisses they leave on their foreheads for one another mustn’t be planned or thought about. Affection, at this point in their lives, is an impulse for them, a reflex. And when, in foreign woods with no light to guide their feet, one can’t walk and is literally helpless without the other, an extended hand affirms all that they’ve endured and all the love they’ve accrued, acting as a conduit through which years of shared memory and life pass.

I feel lucky to have witnessed this hand-holding moment in my parent’s lives. I know it was just a small thing to them, just something my dad did because it was the right thing to do, but like a candle that lights up a cavernous room, this small clasp of their hands illuminated vast parts of them and the union they’ve sewn.

Above: Mom and dad at the start of the hike, before they had any idea what sort of torture they were in for! (hence the smiles!)