Sometimes the road is a time machine…in reverse.  The narrower some valleys get, the slower time seems to move, until at some point I find that it’s moving backward, taking me to centuries gone by.  The people here are not from the 21st century.  They, their houses, fields, crops, and animals are locked into 17th or 18th century.  I see this every day, with every step, and yet most times my stubborn mind refuses to accept it, denies that I’m a fugitive in the past.  Somewhere, somewhen after entering that valley, I fell into a world already gone by.

I see barefoot men poised in the rough, oxen-plowed fields, worn-down picks poised above their heads, the rustic, homemade handles polished by calloused hands.  I see women bent under patterned cloth carriers full of carrots, potatoes, corn, grass, onions, their brown legs shooting down, a seamless connection of color to the soil that enslaves them. 

I see men with pitchforks carved from a single sapling tossing wheat high into the air, over and over again.  The chaff pulls to the side in the breeze like thin brown curtains, the kernels sighing back into the ever-cleaner pile.  I only see this for the two minutes they are in view, but they are there for days, weeks, years, they’ve been there for generations, bending, lifting, sending the grain aloft, watching it fall, again and again and again.

I see women crouching over tattered ground cloths, spreading corn or quinua, or peas, or beans out to dry.  Their hands move so lightly above the cloth it seem they’re casting a spell, placing a charm, warding off evil.

I see families, whole communities, bent over double, rooting through the soil, harvesting potatoes, filling sack after sack.  The young men heave each bag onto their shoulders, 120 pounds apiece, set them in rows; battalions of lumpy figures in the afternoon light.  At night, one of the men will guard the bounty, taking shelter from the cold in cornstalk shelters.  The next morning the workers return, they carry the sacks down from the steep slopes, from the summits, up from the river’s edge, through thickets and over berms. 

I see tiny, shriveled humans, some over a 100 years old, limping along after their meager flocks of sheep or goats, conversing and chiding their animals through toothless gums and sunken cheeks.

I see the roofs of homes covered in hundreds of corn cobs, yellow, black, brown, burgundy.  And the yards full of cornstalks, hay, animal shit, old pots and pans, the cloth and leather tack for the donkeys.  And the smoke billowing out of the cracks and chinks in the kitchen’s walls and eaves.  Inside it is a sooty, smoky black…everything: walls, doors, tables, utensils.  And there, hunched from a lifetime of bending and squatting, a woman feeds bits of eucalyptus branch into the mud stove, the guinea pigs that will some day be dinner scurrying and nibbling beneath her stool.  And the homes themselves, adobe bricks, a mixture of sand, clay, dirt pebbles and hay, each wall in a slow, fifty year melt.  Where does the ground stop and the wall begin?  One, maybe two windows, open, gaping at me, or covered in burlap or cowhide.  The dirt floors, the wooden door lintels, the time and weather-warped doors hanging always a bit askew.  One room, one bed for all the children, one room, if lucky, for the parents.  And those same children, hiding behind corners, peeking over fences, around mother’s skirts, calling siblings to see the gringo walk by, or staring blankly at me, eyes slowly shifting with my steps.  They are barefoot, torn, stained clothes, ever-runny noses, wind and sunburned cheeks, bug bites like braille on skinny legs.

I see the hundreds of tiny, misshapen fields checkered along the valley floor and slopes, remnants of a serfdom that ended within my lifetime, each family with its land but little else, the government some hazy, ominous, occasionally violent specter, known but never seen.

I see, smell, and hear another century every day I walk through the Peruvian Andes. 

And yet,

and yet, the buses, trucks, taxis and private cars rumble, belch, and buzz by me, by them.  They even board them from time to time, to bring harvests to market, to purchase, to visit, to learn.  But I can’t help but think that each car is like a shooting star to them, something briefly seen, ephemeral, untouchable…not of their time.

And yet,

and yet, there, in each home, placed almost worshipfully in a clean space sits a television, flickering images and tinny sounds of L.A., Madrid, Miami, London, Tokyo, Las Vegas, Rome, Rio De janeiro, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Singapore.  Coca Cola, bikinis, white skin, blond hair, Lincoln Navigators, mansions, music videos, street lights, traffic signals, jewelry, skyscrapers, business suits, Kmart, cathedrals, malls, carpeted floors, Brangelina, the Tube, the Louvre, bullet trains, crystal wine glasses.  What does that all mean to these men and women who’s work knows no beginning or end, who wash their hands and faces every day, their bodies every week in cold, contaminated water, who’s tools, homes, way of life in general has not changed in two, maybe three centuries?  How does the 21st century compute in such a world?  Do they treat it as a kind of science fiction, a titillating fancy, unreal?  Do they long for what they see, dream about it, wonder at their lot in life, compare themselves to what flashes off the screen and into their eyes?  Or is it just one more unexplainable thing in a world full of strangeness?

And who am I to them, as I pass them by? An alien?  Do they judge me (and why?), see me as just another rich, privileged whitey that leapt from the TV onto their winding road?  Can they comprehend my reality?

And what are they to me, as they pause a moment to watch me?  An anachronism?  How can I judge them (and why?), even catch more than the tiniest glimpse of the richness of their lives, or even comprehend them, their world? 

We live in different times, and this road in this narrow valley is our time machine.