MY ANTI-BUCKET LIST

Climbing Half Dome a 3rd time is on my anti-bucket list.
Never again. What was I thinking the 2nd time around?
On the way back down, I developed a fear of heights.
I sat on the ledge at Glacier Point, beyond the guardrail. 
I also sat on the lip of Half Dome. What was I thinking?

When I climbed Yosemite Falls, I had a high fever,
the view from above was to die for, but not worth dying for.
Coming down the slot canyon was a total bitch.

I probably won't climb Mt. Whitney again.
I  crawled on hands and knees, across the summit,
a knifeback ridge with a straight drop off on either side.
I practically kissed the rocks at the top.
Then I had to descend. What was I thinking?

I will never again climb the crevice at Sonora Pass,
the view from the ridgetop was stunning,
but then I had to back down the chimney,
I was fatigued, with overtaxed muscles.
My boyfriend guided me down, step by step,
but to fall, sans ropes, would be certain death.

I have literally scaled the heights of Machu Picchu.
Another climb I will not do again, is Huayna Picchu,
with that loose steel cable barely anchored to the cliff,
I probably won't hike the Machu Picchu trail again either.
My knees simply wouldn't make it.
Ah, impetuous youth, well-spent.

4/27/18

The Last Rope Bridge

We crossed the last remaining Inca rope bridge, across the Apurímac Gorge north of Cuzco. I didn't dare look down. But then, just before I got to the lowest point, I caught my boot in a rope guardrail, I looked down. Watched something fall into the night-dark pool. A pebble? a twig? something from my backpack?

I froze, causing a traffic jam. John yelled: No! Don't Look down. Look to the far pillar. Look at me. He was throwing me a lifeline. The water swirled like a vortex, sucking me down. His eyes were the color of clouded winter skies.

They say the Q'eswachaka rope bridge was the inspiration for Thorton Wilder's novel, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey." I still have an original 1927 copy in my bookshelf, it belonged to my lovely Argentinian Spanish teacher. I feel bad that I never returned it, she's long gone now, having crossed over the bridge decades ago.

Once there were numerous rope bridges in the Andes. It is mid July. Anniversary of the bridge collapse. Am I Doña María or Pepita? Please don't let this one collapse, I prayed to any gods who would listen. If it collapses, it is God's will.

Every June, the rope bridge reinvents itself with renewed braids of ichu feather grass and sedges. Yes, there is also a modern bridge but this is not about convenience, or about the modern world. It is a longstanding cultural tradition dating back 600 years or more, the bridge is a gateway the Inca Trail.

They say this is the last rope bridge of its kind in the Andes. Family clans on both sides of the gorge make bundles of grass-ropes and plait them into long cables, they bind rock pillars on either side of the gorge to honor their ancestors and to honor Pachatata and Pachamama.

On each side of the gorge, the villager twine and plait the ropes carefully, untold lives depend upon their strength and fortitude. Spans that once held the weight of an invading army on horseback. The handrail is the width of a man's waist, the woven floor, punctuated with boards and twigs, grows new grass in the crevices, seed-holds, both its origin and its destruction.

It takes a week to renew the vows of bridge and trail, of sky, water and rock, and it ends with festive rituals honoring the apus, or mountain guardians. They say Apurímac, headwaters of the mighty Amazon, means gods of the laughing river. Or more accurately, divinity oracle.

The oracles in the gurgling river were laughing at us, all right. It seemed like it took a lifetime for me to cross that bridge to get to the other side. There was no thought of turning back. It was also the beginning of the end. We could only go on from there.

riding a packhorse in the Andes fragment

Addendum to falling off the wagon post...

Once I was riding a packhorse up Dead Woman Pass in the Andes, and she swung around on the incredibly steep hill into a massive madrone limb, so I did the leg flip to dismount uphill. Now I was used to riding up steep hill as our hill in Forest Knolls nearly defies the angle of declination—but I forgot about the weight of my camera bag/backpack, so I rolled off the OTHER side, ass over teakettle as he swung back around. I was admiring his legs from his belly. Same instinct saved me then.

I might add that the pack horse had NEVER been ridden before in his life—he really was a pack horse with a wooden frame and blanket. But he was the only horse in "town" (wide spot in the Inca Trail) as we got off the train late—so I fashioned a crude hacamore out of stiff leather that was next to useless—He ran away with me earlier—into the wall of a chicha bar—the Andean men scattering like flies. I merely lifted my leg over his withers as he slammed sideways into the adobe wall at 30MPH. The hut shook, sounded like s drum! So he was more inclined to pay me very careful regard—though I didn't speak Quechua, I did speak horse well enough.

From a Facebook post

AFTER THE SOLSTICE, MACHU PICCHU

© Maureen Hurley 1984 All rights reserved.

On the northern slopes of the Andes, 
the packhorse veered sharply from the trail
that led to the fabled lost city of the gods,
makeshift hacamore biting into his eyes
he was running blind, but his hooves knew
the paths, both sacred and profane.

I pulled the runaway's head into in my lap,
I gasped as the thin air whipped my face
thigh muscles burning to maintain balance,
but his eye was a lake of fear rimmed by a pale shore
as I hammered on his hollow forehead with my fist.
Perhaps he was remembering his Andalusian blood,
his tail was a prayer flag raised high to the wind.

The grey gelding raced up the slope to a chicha bar.
Unaccustomed to the live weight upon his back,
his hooves tattooed a drumroll of panic on hard clay.
At the last second, I hoisted a leg over his neck,
as he slammed sideways into the adobe wall,
the wooden pack frame splintered into kindling
and the hut resounded like a wooden drum.

The startled Indios abandoned their beer gourds
and scattered to the four directions like crickets
away from the flash and churn of hooves and teeth,
and a crazy gringa astride a wild packhorse, sidesaddle,
without a bridle, only a stiff lariat across his nose.


* * *

Like Frost's pony, the dappled packhorse

was used to stopping there. No frozen woods
or downy lake, this was an alien land. He stood shaken,
with heaving flanks, head hung low, nostrils flaring red,
as the Indios gathered around a crazy Epona in their midst.

The Poet rode up to translate us out of that mess.
The Gates of the Sun and Moon to the Lost City
of the Incas opened wide to let us in.
We made peace offerings on the intihuacana.
We made poetry, equating it to eternal love,
we played a benediction of mathematical equations
with the piercing stars of the Southern Cross,
compared it to the emptiness of the sky to the south,
and descended into the inferno, as a forest fire
raged on like a ruby-throated monster gone mad
on the terraced slopes of Machu Picchu.



But when we returned home from the Cordilleras,
the Poet went south, without so much as a tu
or an entonces or even a pues, he translated
the burden of a mid-life crisis, into the classic
binary subdivision with a blonde student—
younger than his daughter. Of course. She was
a descendant of the ill-fated Donner Party,
she was born into a cannibal hunger for men,
and a survivor's lust for horseflesh and melodrama,
he blamed her strange appetites on the vagaries
of weather and stars but in the end, 
she left him for another woman.

Poetic justice.
4/24/2009  
24 Write a travel-related poem

Write about the best time you’ve ever had

Best time… So many to choose from. Where to even begin? This is the throat clearing. There have been moments that are sublime, hard, earned ones, where, after a struggle I’ve been exalted—like the time the fog parted at the Sungate of Machu Picchu, the sacred city emerged, and later that day, after we had hoisted ourselves up the robust cable to the peak above the city, to the temple of the sun and moon. 

There were times we had to crawl through live rock passages carved by Inca hands. Passages where you had to stoop over and if you were the enemy, your head was smitten off as you stood there. The narrow passages were like keyholes, birth chambers or entrances to other worlds. And once you passed through that portal, you were irrevocably changed, you could never go back to who you were. 

Soon, we arrived at the temple, an alter of stone. Huaca del Sol, and as we gazed back on that sacred city time converged. When I was a child, I loved to read my grandmother‘s secret books on the bookshelf near her bed. I remember her reading Hiram Bingham‘s story of Machu Picchu. I used to gaze at the cover, it was a cheap pulp fiction pocketbook older than I was, with edges turned mahogany over time. 

At that moment, looking down at the city, time converged, but before we left for the Andes, my grandmother had already died. And I was heartsick, devastated, my world had fallen apart. She was my anchor, my foundation. The woman who raised me from childhood, because my mother was insane, not cut out for motherhood. 

When I was young, she left me and my young brother on the doorstep like foundlings. Better there than on a church step. This was how I discovered I had a brother. One hot summer morning, there he was, crying. She literally had dumped him and ran. I was so insanely jealous, because my grandmother spent all her time with the baby. I was four going on five but genetics linked us as surely as it did to my granny. 

At the temple of the sun, I cut a lock of hair with an old brass pocket knife of my grandfather’s, with its worn mother of pearl handle, and dull brass hasps where the pearl had broken off. It made a strange sawing sound as it severed a chunk of hair so close to my left ear, I was leaving a genetic marker on top of the dolman. 

Dolman, and old-world term for a new world marker of the spirit world. These were portals, markers to the underworld. Rocks raised as huacas, as alters on the ceiling of the world. Dolman in Ireland. Huaca here, but the same intent the world over and I was standing with a foot in two, maybe three worlds. The old world, and the southern world on the new continent. The new world south of the equator.

Standing on the equator that was another euphoric moment. Standing with the foot straddling two hemispheres was astounding, but was I traveling for myself or for my grandmother? Was I my grandmother‘s eyes, traveling to places I had never been, living the life she never had, because in her era it was never possible? 

She was caught up in the realm of the last vestiges of the Victorian Age where women were wives, and they had children. They didn’t vote, but she had her suffragette dreams to write and paint and live alone in a bee-loud glade. 

Wanting to please her, I lived the life she never had. I was seeing the world, I was bearing witness to the wonders of the world. But she was dead, gone, past, and only with the spirit realm was she bearing witness to what I saw with these mortal eyes. 

I placed the thick strands of my hair, tinted with fire, so like her own hair as to be nearly indistinguishable on the stone altar, placing white crystal rocks gleaned from our lower field in Forest Knolls, after heavy rainfall when the gopherholes became conduits for the rain runoff, leaving white quartz treasures in the small alluvial fans that framed each hole. Small quartz teeth of the mountain to hold down my hair in this strange land.

6/26/06 Writers’ Group

Machu Picchu: sweat of the sun

At Machu Picchu, gold was the sweat of the sun. Hiram Bingham only spent a few hours in the city, never realizing what he had discovered. At the temple of the sun, massive peaks rose to the sky, it was an empire of the sun.

Bingham was searching for the fabled Valley of Vilcabamba, the last Incan capital, and retreat, the Espiritu papmas, the plains of ghosts. He came looking for gold, and mummies. The jungles hid hundreds of buildings he never saw. 

Bingham's exploration was eclipsed by Admussen's discovery of the South Pole. The Golden Age of Discovery was declared over. He returned in 1912 looking in vain for the gold, and the mummies, but the Incan cloaks were made of bat-skins and twilight. 

The last Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, emperor of the Incas, built the city 500 years ago as a summer palace, during a time when these mountains were gods, the thunder was their voice and the Incans were their children.

The conquest of 1532 never touched the fabled city of Machu Picchu. Why did the Incas abandon their city in the clouds? She still sleeps in the clouds, and weeps the sweat of the sun, dreaming of her children.

1/22/96

Paracas, II, first draft

Paracas, II

I have stood in the deserts where it has never rained in living memory, where the ancients brought water from miles away in canals. Snowmelt from the Andes made this desert bloom a thousand years ago, but the Cordilleras grew up to the sky, taking the fertile plains with them, until the water flowed backwards. 

I have climbed the skeletons of ancient cities, on man-made mountains, where strange crows flew to the center of the labyrinth. I have hiked into the heart of the Inca Empire. 

I have been to Sacsayhuaman, the panther of the Milky Way slept there. The red ocher on the walls. I have stood on the Masada at Cerro Baul, where there was a siege of 50 days. No water forced a surrender. 

Why was Chan Chan deserted like all the other citadels along this coast? When the Spanish came? All the deserted terraces lying fallow for 500 years, the desert endures the confession of stone. 

I have carried the red rocks back from Nazca where they have lain undisturbed for centuries, staring up into that forever sky for millennia on end, while the constellations orbited into the Aquarian age. Who knows how long the erosion chewed on their rock faces, the undersides, smooth from river polishing? This place that hasn't seen a river flow in the millennia. 

Skulls and bones have lain here undisturbed for a thousand years. Llama bones and scraps of burial shrouds. The ceremonial death ritual to ensure life. 

Climbing the metal water tower on the Pan-American Highway, we view the necropolis. Chen Chen was already in decline when the Incas invaded Chimo the remains of hundreds of young women in the burial bed of the king. God Kings of Chan Chan. 

Coastal desert reed boats on the Pacific. Where do you find water in the desert where it never rains? Green jewels on cliff edges In the Moche Valley.

I stood at the top of this ancient pyramid at Huaca del Sol, abandoned canals 2500 years old. The the inter valley canal, once fed by a river 60 miles, away was built in 1100 A.D. There are hundreds of canals and river valleys here, they used the water to measure the degree of slope. I've walked down those dry canal beds, with their sophisticated hydraulics on par with the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids, as a great ancient engineering feat.

Meanwhile the land rose like a budding tooth. 

El Niño in 1983, flooded this region; 50 feet above the valley floor there is a flood line with freshly eroded bricks above it. The taxi driver tells us of the flooding of El Niño, he said that the Pan-American Highway was underwater. 

I'm reminded of the pink flamingos at Titicaca, on the altiplano, the giant Andean coots and grebes, the shell middens like giant chess figures dotted the landscape on this rapidly receding coastline where one coastal uplift of 60 feet at a time, combined with a deluge of rain, forever altered the landscape. 

The orange and red Peruvian buses with their white stripes like a reflecting mirror shining on the desert into these opposite shores. 

I've stood in dry riverbeds, and I have been the raw scarred banks, decades after the deluge. All those skulls staring out to sea, refusing to stay buried, as if the sea held all the answers.

Only now, after seven years, every cell in my body having replaced itself, but what about my hair? Surely my hair hasn't replace itself, for it is longer than seven years growth. 

On the temple of the moon above Machu Picchu I wanted to leave something of myself behind for my dead grandmother and so I cut off a chunk of my hair and left a quartz rock from home at the top of the moongate. 

December 3, 1995 (from my journal)

See Letter to Luis Kong, from the Necropolis, Paracas 1988

IN THE CLOUD FOREST

IN THE CLOUD FOREST

                           —for JOS

A través de la noche de piedra, déjame hundir la mano

y deja que en mí palpite, como un ave a mil años prisionera,

el viejo corazón del olvidado!

     —Pablo Neruda, IX, Alturas de Macchu Picchu

On the trail to Machu Picchu,

fire opened the door to memory.

Our eyes mirrored the struggle

of the selva’s final story in the cordilleras.

Smoke peddled light across the sky.

Speculatively met us at the pass

of the abandoned fortress, Huaylabamba,

with tarnished masks and season tickets.

Gave us ringside seats—our eyes fondled

the cleavage of the Andean night chained

in firecrested ruby and golden necklaces—

the angry mantle of a campesino’s escaped milpa fire.

Cut off from the wounded hems of snowfields,

and chained to the heights, we dreamed of baptism by fire,

meteors trapped within the smoking mirror of the sun,

and of honor among thieves in this crucible of silence.

We climbed the long ladder of the earth to balconies of the sky,

to draw cool air through Neruda’s wet shrouds,

to firewalk on the coinage of coals and seasoned stars,

and to navigate the adamantine flame of the Urubamba river.

We kissed the secret eyries of crowned solitudes,

we gathered orchids, we entered the shining path to the heart

of the city of stepped stone, we burned poems written in blood

on the intihuacana. We emerged unscathed only to lose faith,

we scattered our ashes to the wind for seven years.

Waited for something—anything—to happen;

perhaps an irrefutable sign from the gods.

7/6/94