I don’t which is worse: to be thousands of miles away when a loved one is ill or being by their bedside listening to the beeps of monitors. Either you get the stink-eye from nurses untangling tubes connected to monitors, or you feel helpless because your heart is in one place, but your body is in another.
That’s what’s happening with me right now. I’m in small town of Huaraz the Kathmandu of Peru, on the foothills of the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Negra, the highest mountains in a tropical zone, part of the Andes. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law, a fusion of Archie Bunker and GI-Joe, is in a hospital outside of Detroit, his health a constant quagmire thanks to Agent Orange.
I took the bus from Lima (an eight-hour ride) to Huaraz, keeping tabs with my sister about her husband. It’s funny the places you can get cell reception in the world, it being a lot more universal than clean toilets. But the Cruz Del Sur bus line did have pretty nice facilities, that being of utmost importance when you’re at age when your bladder has a mind of its own.
And in case you’re solo traveling around Peru, Cruz Del Sure buses are a lot nicer than motorized rickshaws, which are a popular way to get around in off-the-grid places.
After the eight-hour bus ride from Lima, I wandered to my hotel, my heart as heavy as my backpack. The lobby contained a sea of international backpackers playing on their cellphones as their bodies acclimated to the higher altitude and thinner oxygen. The oxygen-thin air is the equivalent to eating a rice cake when your lungs are craving a crusty a chunk of sour dough bread. Plus, the air in Huaraz is dusty so you feel like you are breathing into a vacuum cleaner bag. The good news is that good smells are smellier, too. Potatoes potato-ier, the chicken chickenier, the aroma of fresh bread tortuous to those on gluten free diets.
While I was bumping into thoughts of my brother-in-law everywhere, the mountains were humbling. I felt like a jester in the presence of a king, trying to remember how to curtsey. The mountains, some towering over six thousand meters, were a good reminder about the bigness of God. Yeah, I’m a bible thumper, get over it. But pictures captured with a 12-megapixel lens on a cell phone, meaning there are 12 million individual pixels to each photo, cannot capture the magnitude of mountains. Duh. I tried anyway, my photos looking like those oil paintings you get on sale after Christmas, minus the wooden frame.
Trying to ignore the suckiness of being away from family, I walked around the city focusing on the true beauty of Huaraz: that being the landscape of people. The grit in their expressions. The dirt under the nails. The roadmap of trials crisscrossing their faces. I was lured to this woman at the local market, her face telling a thousand stories that I will never hear. The way she slumped over reminded me of my mom. Is she worrying about a sick family member or she just suffering indigestion from eating one of those hot dog things next to the eggs?
Kidding aside, this woman’s life, like anyone else’s, is made up of countless grains of sand, slipping through an hourglass, just like that soap opera, Days of Our Lives. Each day is one you can’t get back, something that bothers me like a pebble in my shoe.
Do something with your sand, already, I told myself as I left the market.
My first grain of sand in would be to find a church to pray.
I found a church and wandered in, a dog following me. I wondered what he had to pray about. I prayed for so much stuff. My brother-in-law, my country, students, family, the sad looking old lady. It was a grain of sand well spent. Well actually, about ten minutes.
The pews at the church weren’t filled with tourists snapping selfies. They were filled with people on their knees, their hands folded and their heads bowed. I thought of earthquakes, my irrational fear, if my hourglass would end one day like the parents of Paddington the Bear (That’s how he ended up an orphaned Ursidae in England. His parents died in a Peruvian quake). If my life does end that way, please eat marmalade in my memory.
Folks in this area of Peru do worry about earthquakes, their past haunted by the Great Peruvian Earthquake of 1970. I’m not sure if that’s the one that killed Paddington’s parents, but fifty thousand people died due to mudslides and an avalanche triggered by forty-five seconds worth of rumbles. In the nearby town of Yungay, the only thing that survived the earthquake in 1970 was a statue of Christ. The statue of Christ is now a huge memorial. Whether you are a Bible-thumper or an eye-roller, the sight of this Cristo statue will send chills down your spine…which is my excuse why I wasn’t able to take the photo myself.
But in the church, after I shooed the dog away, it struck me. By sharing each other’s burdens, our loads are lighter, except for folks praying for parking spaces. You’re on your own.
We can’t stop the earthquakes or the unexpected tragedies in our lives. But we can, with the help of others, get through each one of them, even with thin oxygen, and even with a grain of sand in our shoe.
