Camana, 900 km south of Lima, on the Pacific coast. To get here from the South you have to
drive 4 hours through the desert.
Helen and I drove the first two hours last night from Mollendo, another
beach town on the water. Mollendo
was covered in shanties… oddly enough it cost over 50 soles to stay in any of
them… we found a little place on the outskirts of town for 30 soles a night,
but it had no running water.
Modern shiny-tiled floors,
new paint, a 20” statue of a porcelain saint in the corner, a quality
bed with clean sheets (only the faintest odor of someone else), but no running
water… the toilet is filled with foamy chemicals so when you take a dump the
bacteria is neutralized. But after
an evening and night and morning of urine and definite funky defecation, the
chemicals are taken over by the body’s jettison. Our host, a 16 year old kid running the hostel with his
parents away, probably didn’t know how to control his water tank and misplanned
the night.
In Mollendo we played Scrabble and took it easy. After filling the toilet and sleeping
soundly, we woke up and went to the beach. Dry Heat… the mountainous desert of sand stretches from the
peaks of the Andean foothills and into the ocean. One big extra-terranean beach. The equatorial sun beats on these mountains and no rain
falls. In Lima they say “it never
rains.” Just a fog once in a
while. And here it seems the
same. Grass and vegetation only
grow in the valleys where water accumulates as rivers. And in the valleys farmers grow melons
and fruit-bearing cacti and grapes.
Cattle graze, and fields of grain lay next to ocean beaches.
We beached in Mollendo under a rented umbrella. Fifteen minutes in the sun here and
you’re cooked…. Literally fifteen minutes. Everyone on the beach –everyone – is under the cover
of an umbrella. Until now it
has been easy to forget how close to the equator we are. The altitude of the Andes masks the
length of the days and intensity of the sun. Down here the sun is painful and demanding for most of the
day.
And at night, the sunset.
Last evening Helen and I drove towards Mollendo, but were
stopped en route by a huge traffic jam.
I pulled around the line hoping for a break… a police officer stopped
me. “Donde van?”
“Buenas Tardes
senor… vamos a Camana.”
“Mm m. You
can’t pass”
“What’s wrong? Why not?”
“There’s a huayco ahead”
“Forgive me… but what’s a huayco?”
“Uncontrolled currents in the road, and it’s the only
road. You can’t pass.”
So we turned Donald around and raced to the last hostel we
spotted and got a room. The hostel
was a trucker hostel… huge, cavernous, and echoing with voices and
laughter. Men shuffled by and
didn’t say a word, didn’t respond to “hello.” So we got some food and relaxed inside the purple and
yellow room.
This morning we bought fresh melons and drove to the
beach. Bad Donald sped at a
velocity of 100 km/h today on several occasions.
Today is Valentine’s Day. Our romance is flitting from day to day, discovery to
discovery. Occasionally you open a
door and behind it is something so unusual and grotesque you cant help but
stare and study its intricacies.
Often these complex scaly folds aren’t pleasing. Like staring at a body in a car
accident… are they dead?
Alive? What’s that
there? A foot protruding from a
blanket. Surely that’s a dead
man’s foot. And this foot is so
inspiring… a flood of ideas and memories, realizations and tappings into your
darkest imaginations. What will
his family think? His wife? Children? When will I be under a blanket? How can I prolong the time until this inevitability? Who can I save?
I have seen a dead man on this trip. A motorcycle accident in the rain. A group of twelve or fourteen men in
raincoats, huddled around a swaddled man laying still on the pavement.
But today no humans dead… a living truth in the form of a
poem so real and devastating to behold.
A letter typed to an old lover.
A lover still with talons in the now. A snake slowly digesting its prey. I had to stop and stare. And the poison seeped into my flesh, from my eyes and
towards my center of organs. But I
have built a wall… my cells turned cold and spit and writhed the venom out as
anger and maltrition. And it only
bred fear and violence, good for nothing but more of the same. A bitter battle between old lovers in
the desert hurts. And we saw many
vultures and whipped each other while the tornadoes spun and spun for miles
into the baking sand.
Helen is soft and strong, and comforted my pain, uneasy,
sickness and I started to heal because of her. She can make you feel better when you really need it. I was bleeding less into the car. We made it to Camana, found a room,
went to the beach which was being played by a few beautiful families. Little boys in cowboy hats tugged
bottle-boats on string, soccer and splashing. I covered myself in mud and Helen found round stones…
marbled, purple, blue, and black as coal, all smooth.
Dinosaurs lived here 150 million years ago. Back then this desert was a jungle and
prairie and the ocean was very different in its boundaries. We didn’t exist then.
I’ve been worried on this trip more than ever that we won’t
exist in several generations. Can
we handle life with no petroleum and no potable water? Do we really want to expend all the
energy it will take to kill other civilizations (possibly drawing lines within
the “United” States) in order to secure life-sources such as water and air?
When the shit hits the fan, the most “civilized” nations may
very well be the least prepared… the people here regularly live with no
electricity, petroleum, or running water… they survive as they have for
millennia. They are Native
Americans. But here is another
example of talons and prey… petroleum is a drug needed by the engines of
modernity. The more we civilize
these people with our modern cars, chemicals, and materials (including media
and information technologies) the more they become dependent upon the resources
that fuel these conveniences. Do I
think we should limit their right to cars and technology? No. But we should reconsider our involvement in their economy.
To get to Camana we drive through the coastal desert. The roads are new and freshly paved, a
wonderful improvement over the tedious rocky dirt roads that are much of Peru’s
transportation network. But every
once in a while you see more and more giant trucks weaving around bends
carrying huge vats of minerals and chemicals…. Then around a corner out of the
sand and sea looms an enormous structure of steel and smokestacks stabbing the
sky and fuming the air. Huge pipes
lead ominously into the water. All
the signs are in English… “CAUTION”
“SECURITY ZONE 1”
“SouthernPeru Refinery.”
Southern Peru is a Canadian corporation… Canada is one of
the other members of the G8 summit… the most powerful countries in the world.
You can see from our pictures that this is a unique
environment. Certainly there are
geological features and compounds here that the modern world wants. And if North American and European
companies (Bechtel, Halliburton, and other large engineering firms) decide they
can profit from these minerals and resources and prove a benefit to the
American people, then the government will work with them to open doors. Perhaps we’ll lend Peru money (we
already have) and use it to build more
industries (we’ll build them… no problem.
They just have to buy the help with our money) and operate them and run
them with petroleum. Then we’ll
have a share in the product and license to break regulations when they fail to
pay the impossible debt.
No internet for a while, gonna post this for now, more
coming. Don’t lie it? Say why, please. We need an open discussion on this.
Bless everybody.
