The Craziest 72 Hours of my Life - Interlude

Alarm at Hotel Suecia 2
Miracles
Aguas Calientes
Machu Picchu
Back to Cusco
Strangers on a Train
Cusqueñas y cusqueñas

Marco, not Mark

Once I passed midnight, I was ready to go home; however, my new friends weren't hearing of it, and kept plying me with Cusqueña and rum and cokes. It is amazing how long one can subsist on that diet. Finally, at 4:00, after the last bar closed, the entire group that was still out--Yésica, Ana, Javier, and a couple other friends--walked me back to Suecia, to make sure I made it in okay.

Somehow, I found the strength to kick my shoes off. I dropped a sleeping pill in my mouth and closed my eyes. In the short time before I fell asleep, I reviewed the past 22 hours: Roy, Aguas Calientes, Machu Picchu, Jamie, Peliculas, Rosa, Yésica, Ana, Javier, "Losing My Religion". 

"Someday," I thought, "someday I've got to write this down. It'll make one hell of a story."

Then again, I thought as I dropped off, I'm not sure it's all believable. I'm not sure I believe it all myself. 

*********

My shitty little rental phone started beeping at 9:00 in the morning on July 29, 2007, and I forced my eyes open.  I squinted at Cody and Adam's beds. Empty. They were probably already in Lima.

 It wasn't possible. I wouldn't make it.

It wasn't a hangover I had--whatever I had drank, I had danced out. It was a sinister cabal of exhaustion, dehydration and latent culture shock, mixed with Cusqueña, mineral water and the echo of shitty dance music.

But I had to pack. I had to shower. I had to eat. I had a bus to catch. 

I forced myself out of bed and started looking for my shower stuff. Lima, here we fucking come.

**********

Taking a shower was an adventure at Hotel Suecia 2. You had to walk all the way to the top floor and around, and then undress inside the tiny shower room. The hot water consisted of an electric heater that boiled just a tiny bit of water and rest was cold, so if you wanted warm water you had to content yourself with just the lightest drip of water. Essentially, this consisted in scalding about a square inch of your body at a time while the rest of your skin froze. You also had to be careful not to touch above the tap, or you'd get a little shock.

My shower completed, I began to pick up our room. What a fucking mess. Two empty bottles of rum, one of whisky, and countless bottles of Cusqeña and mineral water. Three guys, eight nights--what the hell else could I expect? I got some trash bags from the front desk and dumped everything in. 

Most of my clothes were clean--we had visited the laundromat across the street two days before. I shoved them into my hiking backpack and left the dirty stuff on top. 

I walked just far enough away from the Plaza de Armas for the prices to go down, where I paid four dollars for rice, steak, onions, peppers, fries (lomo saltado) and a Coca-cola. It was heavy food for so early in the day, but I knew I had a long trip ahead of me. 

When I got back to Suecia it was going on noon. I was glad I'd finished everything because between my exhaustion and the heavy food my body and mind briefly went out. I was afraid I was going to faint. I had to lay down.

Again, I began to fear I wouldn't make it out of the hotel and down to the bus station. But after 45 minutes or so, probably with the help of adrenaline, I got out of bed and walked up to the front desk to pay our bill. Eight nights cost us 650 soles--about $70 each. 

"You have a great little place here," I told the grandmotherly lady who ran the place. "Hopefully I'll get back here someday."

"Oh, you will, young man," she said. It was not a question.

It was time. With my big hiking bag on my back, and my smaller one in my hand, I took one more look around what had been home for the last week. 

"Thank you, Hotel Suecia 2," I murmured. 

Out in the bright Cusqueño sunshine, I trudged down to the Plaza de Armas and got a cab to the Cusco headquarters of Líneas del Sur, the bus company that would take me to Lima. It was quite a ways away, in a part of the city I had not been in, a more modern, grimy part of the city. 

Despite my ill physical situation, I had managed to arrive early. I sat down on an uncomfortable bench, where not far away a couple was making out vigorously, as apparently they would be separating for a few days. People always seemed to be making out vigorously in public in Latin America. I suppose it's because they all live with their parents so they can't go anywhere private. 

I sighed and closed my eyes. I tried to remember the whole week, but I was too tired. Instead, I kept replaying in my head the doorway of our hotel room as I had left an hour ago. 

"Thank you, Hotel Suecia 2," I had said. But as I sat there on that bench, bone-tired, the couple loving each other to my right, I realized I had been thanking much more than Hotel Suecia 2. I had been thanking Cuzco and everything that happened there for seven days. And in a very real way, I was thanking my Higher Power that had made it all possible.

Southern Iowa - Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

I DID NOT GROW UP IN Southern Iowa. A year after I was born in the hospital in Sigourney, Iowa, my dad got a job in what was then called Northwest Iowa Technical College, just outside of Sheldon, Iowa. My parents bought a big old white house just across from the City Park. From what I understand, the move was not permanent in their minds, but life does what it does, and 42 years later my dad still lives in Sheldon, albeit in a smaller house.

Sheldon is not Southern Iowa; it is the full embodiment of Northwest Iowa, a different beast entirely. But I sort of consider myself an honorary Southern Iowan: At least 4-5 times a year, Mom and Dad would throw the four of us in the back of the family station wagon, a bright green 1977 Plymouth Volare, strap suitcases to the top Clark Griswold-style, and haul us all down to spend time with family in Southern Iowa.

We'd go visit my dad's mom, Helen, who lived in another small Southern Iowa town, Lovilia. Compared to Clarkdale, Lovilia was a metropolis, home to six or seven hundred people, with a Casey's and even a school. My Aunt Elaine was in the last senior graduating class of Lovilia High School, in 1962; my dad went through eighth grade and rode the bus to Albia, a bigger town nine miles south, and 30 miles north of Centerville, for high school. When I was a boy, the school served kids only through 4th grade; now, no one goes to school there, and a self-proclaimed musician who says he's related to me lives there.

Like Clarkdale, Lovilia's boom times were when the coal mines were in full swing in the early 20th century. My dad's ancestors came not to mine, however, but as part of the Homestead Act of the 1860's, whereby the United States Federal Government doled out 160-acre portions of land to families willing to work the land for five years. Eager to escape distrust and outright bigotry towards the Irish back East, my dad's descendants took the plunge. Although my dad grew up a "town kid", many of his aunts and uncles were still farming in the 1950's and 60's when he was growing up, and he learned the farming work ethic.

My dad, Ron, son of Helen and Orvil, who died in 1956 from a heart complication due to a childhood infection, had met my mom, Connie, daughter of Mike and Maxine, at a dance in downtown Centerville when my mom was a high school junior and my dad was studying at the local community college. Three years later, they married. My dad had been drafted and decided to join the Air Force for a four year tour, the first two of which they spent in what was then West Germany, and the latter two in South Carolina. Having served his time, my dad got a teaching job in New Sharon, Iowa; four years later came the move to Sheldon.

Our six-hour drive forays into Southern Iowa were frequent and varied; sometimes we'd stay just 36 hours or so, for some occasion; sometimes, in the summer, my brother and I would be there for ten days, staying with my grandma and aunts and uncles. Mainly we'd stay in Lovilia, but sometimes we'd stay in Ankeny with my Aunt Elaine. My mom's ten siblings were quite literally spread out over the whole country: Nebraska, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana--and we rarely saw them. Two of them, however, had stayed in Centerville, Maxine's two oldest kids from her first marriage. We'd stop over and see Uncle Wesley and play our cousin Kirk's Atari and play ping pong; but when we went to Centerville, we always stayed at my Aunt Loretta's house a block off Highway 2.

And then, sometimes, we'd even go to Mystic.

This is why we study Rome

We got these new social studies textbooks this year, so I let the students pick out some things they would be interested in learning about.  One of them was the Roman Empire, which was cool with me, 'cause I don't know much about ancient Rome, either. I was dissatisfied with the details the book provided, however, so I decided to show a couple videos to supplement the material. When we were watching this video, on the downfall of Rome, a part of it really struck me. I will write it down verbatim here:


Political power was concentrated in too few hands...the wealthy were forgetting the old democratic ideals: balancing the power of rulers with needs of ordinary citizens....Rome had turned its back on the common man....The ancestors of Roman peasants like Gaius led humble but dignified lives as small farmers....But slave-owning aristocrats had commandeered their land and evicted them....Destitute families flooded into the city, swelling the ranks of sweatshop workers and the urban poor....Gaius grew up in Rome doing menial jobs and a lot of drinking....Like millions of poor Romans, he lived on welfare handouts of grain, and mindless distraction--lots of it....

"The proletariat are lazy, idle, and devote their whole life to drink, gambling, brothels, shows and chariot races. Their temple, their dwelling, their meeting place--in fact, the center of all their desires--is the circus maximus. They talk about nothing else."  --Ammianus

By the 3rd century A.D. the number of days devoted to games had risen from a handful to a staggering 170 each year....Intent on distracting themselves, most Romans didn't notice the social fabric of the empire shredding all around them....Rome's sense of community had disappeared....The elite were increasingly isolated from the poor....

"They are greedy. Their language is foul and senseless. The manners of the poor have decayed completely. They are quarrelsome, and make disgusting noises by snorting loudly through their noses." Ammianus

Upper-class Romans could ill afford their disdain....Gaius would die in squalor and oblivion; but his children and grandchildren would never forget how Rome had shut them out....

*************

And I thought, "Huh."