Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [38]
I hadn’t tried anything like this since my hero Carlton Fisk suggested during NBC’s Game of the Week that kids like me ought to sample a tin of Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Chewing coca, I was delighted to learn, had almost nothing in common with dipping snuff. Instead of tasting like a Marlboro unraveled in your mouth, it had the flavor of green tea with a hint of bay leaf. Unlike my vertigo-inducing initiation into the nicotine club, I felt no head rush the first time I sampled coca. I didn’t feel anything at all. And there was no spitting.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the Andes have, for thousands of years, run on coca. When the Spaniards arrived, only the Inca royalty were allowed to chew this sacred plant, which acts as a mild narcotic—suppressing hunger, boosting energy, and alleviating the effects of soroche. Although very illegal in the United States, coca leaves have about the same relationship to cocaine that Sudafed cold tablets have to crystal meth. Each member of our team happily received his ration every morning, and the few strangers we encountered along the way, once we left Choquequirao, invariably tried to beg a pinch off the muleteers. Twice I saw Juvenal holding a fan of three coca leaves before his lips, as if making an offering to the apus. I was too intimidated to ask what he was doing.
Bingham was not a huge fan of coca. “The Indians of the highlands have now for so many generations been neglected by their rulers and brutalized by being allowed to drink all the alcohol they can purchase and to assimilate all the cocaine they can secure, through the constant chewing of coca leaves, that they have lost much if not all of their racial self-respect,” he wrote.
Our next destination was Yanama, the only speck of civilization on the four-day walk between Choquequirao and Juvenal’s hometown of Huancacalle. The route we were following was genuine Inca-built trail, laid down half a millennium ago. The smooth roadwork, intended to bear the soft feet of humans and llamas, had been ground to bits by mules and iron-shod horses. For mile after mile, baseball-sized rocks littered the path, each step reminding me of my tender toes. Every time we crested a ridge, another canyon lay before us. To an observer from above we would have looked like a small army of ants marching across the world’s largest salad bar, one gigantic bowl at a time.
John approached the act of walking like a craftsman. “Every step, every second, I’m thinking, concentrating,” he told me. “I remember every trail I’ve ever been on. I can remember where I made wee stops in India in 1987.” Occasionally, he’d bark out a bit of advice over his shoulder. “You’ll want to stay as close to the edge as you can, Mark, to catch the breezes from below on the updraft. Just watch your footing.”
I was not concentrating especially hard. As I walked hour after hour with little to focus on but John’s dusty boots in front of me and a deep chasm off to one side, random thoughts and buried memories began to percolate into my brain. Does Juvenal dislike me? I don’t think he’s called me by name once in the entire week we’ve been out here.... Remember that time in first grade when you forgot your lunch? And Sister Teresa took you over to the convent where all those super-old nuns dressed like penguins ate roast beef and made you drink a mug of Sanka with Sweet’n Low because it was so cold out? . . . Oh, we’ll all have chicken and dumplings/ When she comes.... What could John be hiding under that hat? Is he bald? Does he have one of those Gorbachev wine stains? . . . Whatever happened to that long-legged girl in your Victorian poetry class who invited you over to make fondue and watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Didn’t you stay out until 4 A.M. the night before and cancel on her because you were so hungover? It never occurred to you until this very moment, in the middle of the goddamned Andes,