Life in Lima can be just as ordinary as life anywhere. Sure, there’s occasional earthquakes to shake things up in Peru, buses lit on fire during a city-wide transit strike, parents of students getting kidnapped, and dogs better dressed than their owners. But the daily grind? It’s no more exciting that what you’d experience in Schaumburg. My hiking group is the counterpart of mall walkers at Woodfield Fall armed with sunglasses and yoga pants, strolling pass old ruins instead of Cinnabon. We count steps on our phones, hoping to reach ten thousand to burn off the Lomo Saltado we’ll have for lunch as we chat about our ailments. But Saturday, there was some excitement in our group. We had a visitor who went by the name of Faucet. Faucet is a plumber who services the toilets at the South Pole, his plunger the pass to the world’s last frontier.
I don’t even want to know how much he charges.
I have thought about plumbers since moving abroad, as I had a very expensive toilet repair in China. It was a blizzardy Superbowl Sunday in Chicago and the seal on my tenant’s toilet broke. The cost was comparable to a round-trip ticket to Ohare for me to plunge it myself. But I have never thought about toilets in Antarctica until hiking some ruin in Peru, and suddenly, a million stupid questions popped into my mind. I envisioned an outhouse surrounded by penguins. Butts freezing to porcelain thrones. And the big question: which direction does the water swirl down the hole?
Faucet’s answers were more fascinating than the Huaca Huallamarca ruins we were observing. Come to find out, a lot of people live at the Pole. Scientists and researchers from all over the world, and at certain times of the year, astronomers. There’s a hospital, dentist chair, and even a bar. Faucet scrolled through his phone.
“Let me show you something.”
It was a video of him in a parka, a prism of colors behind him as the sun kerplunked over a frozen tundra. His mittened hands were holding a coffee, the liquid frozen in mid pour.
“The food is amazing, at the Pole,” he said.
They bring about two shipping cartons of food to the South Pole, which includes nine months’ worth of eggs. That’s their shelf or shell life. After that, the Polers eat eggbeaters. They also have their own garden, growing things just like Matt Damon did in that Martian movie.
I had penguin envy.
At New Years, I’ll be trekking in Ushuaia, the most Southern tip of South America, and just a boat ride away from the Pole. But I think I’ll sit tight.
Prayer
Another thing happened this week. While returning from the jungle market (where vendors from the Amazon share their organic produce, meats and cheese), I also saw Olivia. She is the homeless woman I met when I first moved to Lima in January. Olivia doesn’t fit the mold of what you’d expect a homeless woman to look like. She looks more like a movie star, cast to play a desperate role. Her lips were lost in a smear of red lipstick, her eyes sad like Emmett Kelly, the hobo clown. If Olivia took a different path, she could have been a model, her beauty not extinguished by her plight.
I used to pray for Olivia all of the time when I lived in Kennedy Park for a sting. But since I moved to a different district of Lima, I’d only think about her now and then. But that Sunday when my bag was overflowing with Amazon produce, I saw her. She was standing on a corner, a few small bags of clothing around her feet. I jumped off the bus, the action turning my avocados into guacamole.
“Olivia, how are you?” I asked.
She looked at me with confusion. I guess I didn’t have such an impact on her as she had on me. She squinted her eyes trying to place who I was.
“Do you need money?” I asked, as I reached into my purse.
As her eyes peered into my purse, words got stuck in Olivia’s mouth. When they came out, they were out of sync with her lips, like the soundtrack of a bootleg movie. “I could use a good meal.”
“Well, get yourself ten.”
I was glad that I saw Olivia, but sad, too.
I walked home, the sky a steel gray, something locals call the Panza de Burro (donkey’s belly). But soon, the sun will cut through the Lima grey like a knife. I thought of the sunsets in Antarctica, wondering what they were serving for dinner, and praying Olivia stays safe for one day.
