leaving the altiplano…and some random thoughts

From the Northern reachs of Argentina up to Southern Perú, I’ve been walking atop a giant plateau, the squishing together of two opposing tectonic plates…the Altiplano (high plain, or high flatlands). 

Its average altitude is almost 12,000 feet high, sometimes topping out at well over 15,000 feet.  In the dry winter months it is a brutal landscape of wind and cold-scraped browns, seemingly inhospitable to human life.  The air is thin, the grass is thin, the water nearly nonexistent, and the sudden debilitating snowfalls and freezes more than likely to kill off what little livestock (llamas, alpacas, sheep, cows) are raised there.

In the summer, the wet season, it is transformed.  Plants, many months dormant, surge forth, once bone-dry riverbeds hiss and rumble to overflowing with water.  Grass grows, livestock fattens, crops like potatoes, beans, quinua (a native grain), barley and alfalfa quilt the once-brown lands in soft textures.  Life not only seems possible, it seems absurdly abundant…and yet the arrival of each winter looms darkly in the backs of all people’s minds.  It is the winter that decides, winter IS destiny.  And now, here in Cusco, Perú, the Altiplano recently left behind, it seems such a strange, surreal place, a dreamscape.

I left it behind when I reached the top of the pass called Abra La Raya which could either mean “the striped opening” or “the opening of the ray”.  I like the second choice, because here, at the end of the Altiplano, the mountains crowd in, creating a narrow gap where the sun shines many fewer hours than out on the vast expanses of the plains.

From that pass, I descended, with only the occasional lift upward, for over 70 miles.  The landscape changed with each mile.  Scrub grass and meager plants gave way to shrubs and carpets of green, which transformed into trees and dense parcels of rich grasses, which then led to small forests and tangled undergrowth.

And the water…every crevice, every fold that might collect a few drops of precipitation or tease snowmelt downward, was rough with water, so eager to move with gravity that it folded and spilled over itself until the valley was filled with its constant hum and thrumble.

Corn grew over-head high, wheat, to the chest, bean plants so vivid-green that they looked fake.  Where quinua in the altiplano might reach a short person’s knees, here it towered up to seven feet.  Any land not covered in rocks or water was plowed and planted.  Impossibly steep slopes were tilled.  How in the hell can a crop be planted on a 55 degree incline?  Well, here, in this valley that ends the reign of the Altiplano, they are, who knows how. 

As I descended, day by day, I grew more and more astounded by the absolute wealth and abundance of life here.  It seemed like a paradise, an agriculural Shangri-la.  And yet the people I met along the way demonstrated that such appearances can be downright untrue, let alone deceiving.  Such a treasury of crops means little in today’s world, an entity driven by industry and “product”.  The people who sow and reap such a plenitude of grains and tubers and legumes see, at best, fractions of pennies on the dollar in the local markets when they go to sell their crops.  Mostly, they survive on stockpiles of what they grow, hoping that it will last through the winter.  These people live in tremendous material poverty.  Their homes are made of mud, many of them have thatched reed roofs, courtyards are a mixture of mud and cow, sheep, llama, and pig shit, in many areas there are no potable water systems, sewage systems are nonexistent, with even outhouses little-used. 

And that kind of poverty is the good kind, if you’re an able farmer, not given to alcoholism, if your land is prime, and if you have a healthy wife and children to help you…but a far worse poverty is pervasive in this seeming Eden…a poverty so abject that “animal” is a more deserving descriptive of the lifestyle of the people. 

Homes built on rocky soil, far from streams, with sagging, broken thatch roofs, the courtyards filled with trash, human shit, animal shit, and the resulting greenish-black sludge ankle deep.  The worn-mud homes without a single window, a low door leading into a sooty black, where figures can be seen hunched over smoky wood fires, blank stares from behind crumbling walls, snot running unchecked, un-wiped from noses, open sores on feet and legs, hands reaching out, voices pleading “invitame” invite me, and “una propina señor?” a tip sir, and bluntly, “dame dinero” give me money.  These are the homes with near-feral children nibbling on cornstalks, with the adult males lolling drunk in the sun, with the way-too-old-before-their-time women glancing furtively over their shoulders.

And I walk on, baffled by such contrasts.  Stunned by such wealth-that-isn’t, such animal and vegetable health leading to such a difficult human existence.  It makes me wonder if agriculture of this sort isn’t really an odd form of slavery…with the rulers being the mindless cow, the dense sheep, the automaton chicken, and the inanimate plant.  How many times have I seen an old lady, a women with wrinkled-skin, bony legs, heaped to doubling over with grass she has spent hours cutting, trudging back to feed her 3 meager milk cows, her waning flock of sheep?  How many men, women and children have I seen hunched over a crop of potatoes, digging them up, each one costing much more in energy and time than will be recouped in coins in the market?

Such a fine line.  Such a tender distinction between “poverty with dignity”…that dearth of material goods, but that wealth of laughter, food, shelter, and family unity and “poverty without hope”, that horrible state where existence itself is the only goal, the only known quantity…where laughter and hope are so unknown as concepts as to not even exist…and how strange to see such a state amidst so much life, so much growing, surging vegetable and animal wealth.

and I’m so lucky. 

And so are you. 

And how easy it is to lose sight of that.