Origin Stories and Andean Viagra: The Final Push in Bolivia and Peru

Here I sit in my favorite place: the airport lounge, surrounded by unlimited food and drink. I've just finished my third piece of passionfruit cheesecake because I unironically eat my feelings. The free beer is going salty from the tears. There's nothing I can do but sit still. It's finally time to write the last one.

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There once was a people that lived in the middle of a lake. Once, a long time ago, they lived in a city in the valley, but a flood came and destroyed the city, and so the people built large boats made of reeds, each with a small house on it, and each family lived on their own boat on the water. The people fished and ate trout and sailed, and they used the tall reeds to construct their boats and houses and craftwork and clothes. The lake was large -- so large they coudn't see the shores from the middle -- and deep, and the people prayed to the lake and the stars at night and they lived on its surface in small communities.

A young lake person fell in love with another lake person, and they took a smaller boat further onto the water for privacy. They fell in love, there, at night under the stars reflected on the surface, and they were gifted a larger, family-sized boat, and they celebrated their wedding by surrounding their new boat with a circle of family and friend's vessels, all tied together, surrounded by the blue.

They built a house and had a child, born on the boat, and the child lived on the boat and on the water. And the child would pray to the lake and she would fall in love and get married, and she would have children on the lake, and they would live that way like the people always had, under the stars and under the sun, surrounded by the blue.

"Where did the flood come from?" I asked Luis.

We were sitting at a wooden picnic table set on a ground of dry cut reeds. Around us on all sides was the water of Lake Titicaca -- we floated there on a man-made island, rocking softly in the waves. In front of us, boats carried tourists and Uros people -- the lake inhabitants -- from island to island. We sipped instant coffee under the hot sun.

Luis on the boat

Luis was 40 years old, a father of three, an Uros native. The Uros people, he explained, eventually traded their life on boats for land when they discovered how to make their own floating islands of reeds. He grew up in the community of 5,000 people, there on the water, eventually building a fifty-foot-long island for himself and his family. Now, over coffee, he was telling me the Uros origin story.

"There are three stories of the flood," Luis said. "Luis will tell you the three stories."

He talked in the third person, I think because Spanish was his second language behind Aymara, an indigenous dialect. I had spent the night prior at the Airbnb he built on his island. He had picked me up from the shore the day before in his boat and motored me out, and he spent the first afternoon showing me what life was like an Uros person. We toured the little community -- I heard from a woman who had been born on a hundred-foot boat, I bought cheap souvenirs and swam in the lake. Before dinner we went fishing, just Luis and I, motoring out amongst the reeds and hanging a net. Luis made small noises from the motor the whole time, I think speaking in Aymara to himself or to the lake. He told me the lake was sacred. I asked him more about his religion, but he mostly wanted to talk about fishing.

As the sun set we waited in the boat, and he told me about his daily life. He said the fish swim out when the sky turns red. It's worth staying with the net so thieves don't steal your trout. Sometimes he brings a blanket and sleeps in the boat. Someone brought pigs and chickens to a floating island, so they eat pig and chicken, too. It's a different size net for trout and mackerel. The fish move when they notice the mosquitos. His daughter would have to go to high school on the mainland soon. Luis was thinking about buying another boat.

We caught two trout. I pulled the net in after an hour's wait with fingers going numb in the cold, the sky full of stars around us. We motored home and Luis cooked the trout. I slept in a bed that rolled gently in the lake waves.

The Uros people have been on the lake since the beginning of it all, according to Luis. They pre-date the Incas, and avoided detection by the Spanish in the same way that they escaped becoming slaves to the Incas (a fate that many other indigenous groups suffered): they sailed to the middle of the lake. Now they maintain a lifestyle pretty close to what they always have, living on floating islands made of reeds -- with the added financial support of pretty robust tourism.

As we motored around the community on the second day Luis gave me the rundown on logistics. They have a mobile store -- one guy loads his boat with supplies and makes the rounds from island to island. There's a small school on an island where we dropped his daughter off (via boat) one morning. They have a doctor, but they also have a shaman -- they use guinea pigs as a sort of X-ray, Luis explained: if you feel sick, you hold a guinea pig for a few hours, after which the shaman cuts open the guinea pig. If it's got a swollen kidney, it's because it mirrored your illness. He showed me the reeds, how they chop them. There's one governor of the community, elected yearly. Luis wants to be governor one day, he said.

Over the two days we became pretty good pals -- fishing together will do that. We were pretty different, kind of obviously (I'm a land feller). But we laughed over dumb stuff -- he told me jokes about how hard it was to find a wife when you live on a floating island ("Luis has to send cards to the city every day!"), we dropped his kid off at school, we joked about fish thieves and net thieves and people who drink too much (it's harder to stumble home when you live on the water). Through it all, he kept muttering in what I think was Aymara, talking to himself or to some invisible (or maybe visible) thing around him, and I picked up, through bits and pieces, what life could be like floating on the highest navigable lake in the world. Still, I wanted the big picture, the full story, from the flood onwards. That second day, sitting over coffee in the strong sun on a shifting island, I asked him about the flood, the beginnings, and he told me.

"The Bible says the flood was forty days," he said. "The Incas, they say the flood is from God crying, because the people were worshipping another god." He counted the two theories on his fingers. "The third story is of the pumas, sacred animals. When the whole lake was dry the pumas were looking for water, and they kept climbing and climbing a big hill asking for water every day to survive. And finally, a flood."

I sipped the instant coffee. "What do you believe?" I asked.

"Luis believes in the pumas," he said. He explained that from above, the lake has the shape of a puma, which must be a sign of the truth of the Uros belief. And then he told me one of my favorite quotes.

"But everyone gets to decide which one is most real."

That afternoon, Luis motored me back to the mainland, off to start my last three weeks in Peru. He didn't charge me for the boat ride or any of the food we shared, which he was supposed to.

"Now, Luis has family in United States," he said.

"Heck yeah he does," I said, smiling, imagining him building an island of reeds in the Boston harbor.

Floating island, Louis' youngest playing in the reeds, someone transporting reeds to add to an island, daughter on her way to school

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Rewind: Bolivia

Before the islands was Bolivia, and from the beginning, I could tell that Bolivia would fricken' rock.

I crossed the country on foot in the still-dark morning from northwest Argentina, dodged a $160 dollar visa fee by using my Ecuadorian passport, and boarded a twelve-hour bus to my first stop: Uyuni. I sat next to Don Alonzo, a four-foot tall octogenarian who espoused the benefits of clean, organic food while sipping on an Inca Cola, talking to me through his four remaining teeth. Legendary. At a stop on the side of the road I bought a bag of boiled choclo, which is corn kernels that are four times the size of our flaccid American corn, and me and Alonzo munched it for the six remaining hours while watching the llamas and vicunas and emus ran through the high desert on the side of the road. It felt like the Wild West in Spanish, like the last remaining middle of nowhere.

In Uyuni everything was arid and altitudinous (the town sits at 12,000 feet) and run-down, sand streets and crappy cement constructions. I sat in a packed little comedor with a lady grilling piles of meat outside. "Llama steak?" she asked.

grill master

"Llama steak," I said. Unlimited sides, $1.50 total. The last town to nowhere is a pretty alright place to be.

I toured the salt flats, the largest salt flats in the world, over the course of two days. It's an ethereal, alien landscape, the white crust extending so far that some tourists have gotten lost and died in the middle. At night I went walking to stargaze, and the next morning I set off on a chilly, salty run to watch the sunrise off of the reflection of the pooled water. The second day we drove out of the flats, out into the surrounding high alpine landscape, and stopped in a field of alpacas. Everything was rural, remote, like nothing I'd seen before, the few people smiling with single-digit teeth like Don Alonzo.

As we drove back towards Uyuni, we stopped for a young girl hitchhiking. "I'm going to the next town," she said, and so we drove her. Her name was Rosemary, and she had been walking for three hours already by the time we picked her up. She was heading to school, she said, a five hour walk away.

Rosemary walking to the school building

Rosemary was one of eight children, living in a village so small she had to commute the five hours to go to school in Tomave, a town of "one hundred families" I was told when I asked the population. She made the trip every Sunday and slept at the school with sixty-eight other students Sunday through Friday, and then hitchhiked or walked home every weekend. She was thirteen years old.

We dropped her off at the school. Her words rung in my head, her talk about wanting to go to university and become a civil engineer. As she walked into the cement building and we drove away I thought about what it would would be like to dedicate time helping kids like Rosemary, being a volunteer or setting up a foundation or something, out in the high Bolivian desert. The thought of living in a school house, surrounded by sand and shrub, the tininess and hugeness of it all, driving through a landscape not my own.

Uyuni and the salt flats, plus run selfie

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Here's what I know about Bolivia:

Diddly squat. Mostly. I learned a few things on a walking tour in Sucre. Here's what I've got.

-Bolivia is South America's poorest country. It's super cheap. Some people (Don Alonzo) said that the economy was stable and good, and some people (guy in suit I ate oatmeal across from who worked in the big government building) said the whole thing was firmly lodged in the shitter. Hard to know about money stuff.

-It's very indigenous. Over 60% of the population identify as indigenous. Evo Morales (an Aymara Indian) was elected in 2006 as the first indigenous president.

-It's kind of socialist. Some of Evo's first actions were nationalizing the country's oil and gas industries and redistributing privatized land to indigenous families. His main focus was on raising the standard of living for impoverished indigenous people, and it worked: he more than halved the rate of extreme poverty over his tenure.

-It's proud of it's roots. The indigenous flag flies alongside the Bolivian flag at most government buildings. Native languages are alive and tootin'. It's religiously syncretic, as people hold a mix of indigenous beliefs with Catholicism (for example, pouring out some of your beverage before drinking it as a sign of gratitude, believing in God and in Apus [mountain gods]).

-Coca leaves are king. They're thought to be medicinal (especially for altitude sickness), and many people plug a wad of them in their cheeks all day (they also make a version coated in Stevia, which might explain the country's dental calamity).

-They don't play well with neighbors. They warred with Peru and they warred with Chile and they warred with Argentina and they warred with Paraguay and they warred with Brazil. They lost just about all of them, and the country kept getting chipped down like a lumpy marble in the process (they also lost access to the coastline in the Chilean war, which geopoliticians would argue slated them to a destiny of national poverty).

-It's a whole adventure. It's got the salt flats and the high desert in the south, the high Andes running up its ribs, wetlands turning into jungle in the west, and, due north, La Paz and Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. I loved it.

Here's what I know about me:

Diddly squat. Kidding. One thing for certain: I had just bought a flight home.

No!

Another thing: Buying the flight made me start to go nutso. Real job instead of no job. Small talk instead of trout talk. Chicken breast instead of llama steak. Stuff like that.

You remember this film

So I resolved to eat and run and generally keep flapping about for the rest of my days in Bolivia and Peru. I had three weeks at that point. It was like that movie Bucket List about the people dying. Except I wasn't dying, I was just going to live with my parents for a bit. Kind of like dying. And I wasn't Morgan Freeman. (Although we share qualities.)

So I headed to La Paz with that goal: Eat everything I could, climb everything I could, run everywhere I could, and never, ever give myself a chance to think. All doing, no thinking. Still waters may run deep, but shallow waters stay warm. I'd see everything there was left to see, this time at a crackpot pace. I'd take a long night bus into somewhere and do all of that place's activities and then hop on another night bus to the next stop. I'd eat standing, sleep on the bus, and every waking moment would be dedicated to squeezing the last bit of Latin juice out of this mango trip, not even pausing long enough to wipe the dribble off my chin.

There was just one problem: my feeble tummy, once again a-rumblin'.

I got on a long night bus from Sucre and I realized, I'm at real risk of an accident, here. I was, well, unwell, before boarding, and then as I got on the bus in the rinky-dink parking lot my stomach started aching and feeling generally mal.

There I sat on the worn bus seat, sweating, my head swimming with visions. Me ruining a night bus. Bolivian people screaming and yelling, pointing fingers. National TV news, a bus on fire on the side of the highway, a cut shot to my college graduation photo.

Thankfully I had a bag full of Immodium, (medicine that makes you not use the bathroom). I took a handful, and, even though it felt kinda like when they stopped the Hoover dam from overflowing with plywood (true story -- 1983), it held, and I realized I could do anything for the rest of the trip as long as I had an unlimited supply of no-poop-ums in my med kit.

That night, a lady got on the bus with one of those styrofoam coolers, and she called out that she was selling llama chicarrones. I thought about the Immodium. The plywood stopped the breach in '83. I waved two dollars in the aisle.

If my stomach can survive this, I thought, pulling chunks of llama meat and potatoes with my grubby bus phalanges, it can survive anything.

With such newfound confidence I arrived to La Paz.

Dinner's in the bag!

La Paz is a big modern city mixed with some funky Latin energy. Next meal: Chicken and potatoes for $0.75, sold by a lady sitting at the park, with a ten-gallon garbage bag of chicken and potatoes in front of her that she reached in and plucked from. What am I doing to myself? I wondered. I stopped the thinking.

And then, adventure. I signed up for a three-day mountaineering trip to climb Huayna Potosi, the peak of which sits at 19,970 feet above sea level. It was a grand old adventure, replete with low oxygen, ice climbing, and a 1AM departure to hit the summit. I was tied to a guide named Edgar, an Aymara guy who summits three times a week and who kept saying, "Slowly, slowly," while I tried to crampon-sprint our way up. The altitude gave many people problems -- there were lots of bail-outs, people throwing up, piles of human doo just off the guide line -- but I had a belly full of altitude pills and Ibuprofen and trace amounts of Immodium and I kept my gums tingling with big wads of coca leaves, and so we ended up cruising. Finally by the end, after a successful summit, Edgar told me I was a good athlete and that I didn't even seem tired, and that makes him my new dad.

Photos from Huana Potosi

Part II: Peru

Isla de Sol

From La Paz I took a bus to Lake Titicaca, and spent a night on Isla De Sol, the island where Inca legend has it that the first two humans emerged from. I spent a night on the rural island and hiked it from north to south with a girl from England, and then I skinny dipped in the lake while she looked away (I hope), and then I took a bus and a boat to see Luis on the floating islands (on the Peruvian side of the lake), where he told me his people's origin story.

There are a couple of things that become obvious as soon as you get to mainland Peru. The first: the food is way, way better. The best in Latin America. Better than Mexico. If you're curious why, one reason is that Peru has a large Chinese and Japanese influence from waves of immigration in the mid-1800's and during World War II, which influenced the spices and cooking styles. Ceviche, the national dish, for example, is a limey, gingery raw fish soup. It's the best thing I ever ate, and I successfully didn't think about eating raw fish in dirty street markets in an inland city 300 miles from the ocean.

The other thing that's clear: people were just a little bit testy. Passengers would yell at bus drivers for the bus being delayed, not a lot of "Hola"s on the street, and I watched one car throw a bottle at another for pulling over too quickly. It seemed like everyone was on the verge of bursting, and I wanted to find out why.

And then I found out why: Maca.

Maca, for those who are underwear, is an Andean superfood currently sold in the United States and Europe at exorbitant rates. It grows as a tuber at high elevations, generally black in color, and the ground byproduct is used to make a beverage almost like chocolate milk. I sat down at a little breakfast place in Arequipa and tried it for the first time, and it's dang tasty. The benefits are that it purportedly gives you energy through a boost of B vitamins, but there's another effect (of which I was unaware) that lend it notoriety:

It makes ya dang horny.

Honestly, after that first drink I couldn't figure out what was going on. Streetlamps took on sensuous shapes, the bleat of a donkey sent a shiver down my spine, I was forced to sit with my sweater on my lap on the bus. At first I thought the alpaca meat was getting to me, but that didn't make any sense -- alpacas only breed once a year. And then it hit me. The maca.

I'm joking, of course, but not really -- one of the main reasons maca has been selling like Viagra pancakes in the Western world is that it's used as a natural remedy for weenie problems. So I felt pretty energized, like I had maybe found the fuel to propel my never-stop last few weeks in Peru. But also squirrely. Very squirrely.

And then I thought of all those pent up Peruvians, all those folks drinking maca in the market next to me. If someone cut me off in traffic that day, I'd be liable to ram them off the freeway.

Case cracked.

Typical market breakfast: Oatmeal drink, egg sando, big glass of maca

Anywho, I refused to stop drinking the stuff, and in between my six daily cold showers to stop me from blasting off into outer space I knew I had to keep moving. One place people go to from Cusco is Machu Picchu, and, seeing as how I was one step away from going out and howling with the tin roof night cats, I figured I might as well run there.

The most famous Machu Picchu hike is the Inca Trail, an authentic Incan pathway that connects various now-ruins. The problem is that the Inca Trail costs about $600, is illegal to do without a guide, and sells out months in advance. So the next most popular one is called the Salkantay Trek, and most people take 3-5 days to hike it with a tour group through the mountains and finishing at MP. I looked at the route and figured I could probably run it, and so I ran it in two days, with a big backpack bouncing on my behind, sleeping at a little hostel for the night in between, and then I got a ticket to go to the ruins and saw them the next day at 6 AM, and then I hiked out another six miles to get to the bus stop, and all-in-all it was a pretty hectic three days, logging about 50 miles up and down through the mountains.

Pretty neat elevation map I made on the internet

Photos from the run (slide through)

Photos from Machu Picchu (slide through)

I got back to Cusco and headed to the food market (which shares the same space as the raw meat market and the flower market and the vegetable market and the trinket market). My legs were cooked. I ordered a maca and an egg sandwich. What the heck am I doing to myself? I thought, and then I stopped the thinking. No thinking. And then I planned another run.

I took a few days off in Cusco, including a walking tour and an animal sanctuary to look at condors and more food and endless maca, and then I got right back on the llama, so to speak. I went to a tent rental place and rented a tent and sleeping bag, and I told the lady I was doing the Choquequirao hike and I'd be back in two days, and she said nobody does it in two days, and I said, lady, if you knew how much maca I had in me you'd call animal control. I can do it in two dang days.

Anyway, here's some Incan history: Neither Machu Picchu nor Choquequirao were the capital of the Incan Empire -- that was Cusco, then called "Qosqo," (pronounced "Cusco") which means "navel." Machu Picchu is famous mostly because at one point it wasn't -- the Spanish never found it, meaning that the city, unlike so many other Incan strongholds, wasn't destroyed.

People think Machu Picchu was a royal estate for nobles. Choquequirao, sometimes referred to as Machu Picchu's "little sister," was also likely an estate or an administrative center. One of the differences is that Choquequirao is only 30% uncovered -- the rest is claimed by the dense vegetation. Another difference: while MP gets up to 5,000 visitors a day, Choquequirao averages roughly 12 (Disney's Magic Kingdom gets 57,000, which, if you have to split the magic, means each person doesn't get that much magic).

Here's some more Incan history:

-The Empire only lasted about 150 years. That's pretty short! They controlled territory, though, from Colombia to Argentina.

-They had a 25,000 mile interconnected roadway system. Think Seattle to Miami, eight times.

-No wheel and no writing.

-They were good at plants. The terraces in Machu Picchu, for example, were filled with soil from the river valley, so that they could grow stuff at altitude that shouldn't grow at altitude.

-They're more history than prehistory. At the same time that the Incas were Inca-ing: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the printing press.

Anyway, I did the hike in two days, teaming up with an Australian farmer named Jack who was a nice guy and good hiker but in general knew very little -- he asked me at one point what "terraces" meant, as we hiked around ruins famous for their terracing. The hike was long and hot, down into a canyon and crossing a river and back up the other side, but we moved quick and I tried to teach him basic addition along the way, and we saw the ruins at sunset and sunrise, and it was pretty neat-o.

Woah-hoah! Gettin' pretty good at these

Photos from Choquequirao (slide through)

The day after was my birthday, and I spent it bussing back to Cusco with Jack and returning the tent (the lady called me a "Chasqui," which were the Incan running messengers, which made me feel like the sweetest little strawberry in the patch), and then getting an "Incan Massage"(a regular massage) during which I had to ask the person to be more gentle on my spindly little legs, and then going to a restaurant and eating alpaca before calling it a night at 8 pm. I am floating gracefully into old age.

And then I went to Lima for two days, and then I went to the airport and sat in the lounge and ate three pieces of cheesecake right off the bat. Then I pulled out my computer. I had four hours still until the flight.

I twiddled my thumbs.

For the first time in a month, it was time to do some thinking. Doh!

Other pix

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The last Train of Thought to Nowhere: Reflections on Bolivia and Peru

Reflection 1: Synchronicity

When I started this blog I needed a name for it, and I went through some truly awful iterations before picking "Notes from the Wonderground," which is a play on the title of a famous Dostoevsky book, "Notes from Underground" (by Dostoevsky). I hadn't ever read "Notes from Underground," but it seemed smart at the time to take a title from a smart guy's book. Even better, I thought it made me seem like a smart guy myself.

Well, I found myself with two days in high alpine cabins between climbing the snowy Huayna Potosi mountain towards the end of my trip, and lo and behold, the only book I had saved on my Kindle was "Notes from Underground." So I poured myself some coca tea and read it in a two-day stretch, nestled in a little shack 15,000 feet in the air.

The novel takes the shape of the narrator's "notes" -- essentially his thoughts on life, and it's clear from the beginning that he's a bitter sort of fella. He sees himself simultaneously as inferior to his 19th century Russian peers, but also wildly superior; in his mind he's a tortured genius, while the dumb and "characterless" are out and about, living a jolly, successful life above ground. His own intelligence, according to the narrator, is a paralyzing force, relegating him to a life of inaction.

"I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."

It's a neat book. Part of it, I think, is about 19th century Russia, about which I know exactly nothing.

The part that I understood, though, is that duality between the underground and the aboveground. The "underground" narrator is removed from society by choice -- he hates his peers, but he's also envious of them. He's cast himself in a self-made prison, constantly looking up towards (and down his nose at) the people able to live a simple, active life amongst others.

And as basic as it is, that's a real sticking point on some of the things I've been writing. Life is made for living, which is an active process. Knowledge is great, but not if it gets in the way of the actual experience. We tend to associate happiness with stupidity and intelligence the opposite. Dostoevsky's narrator makes us wonder who's really smarter: the people out the window, laughing, acting, finding success, or the booksmart, angry recluse?

The great thing about the narrator, I think, is that we all have some of him in us. We've all been the hoighty toighty, holier-than, too-cool-to-do. We're each the guy in the thousand-dollar suit walking the dog next to a mud puddle, telling him, "Don't you fricken' dare, Sausage," and we're each Sausage the dog looking at that sweet, sultry mud. Maybe the best knowledge gained of the trip -- really more of an affirmation than new information -- is that the whole world is aboveground. And you can do stuff in it. With other people. And it's freakin' wonderful. Sure, it's a little ironic to be editing this while living literally underground in my parent's basement, but the message stays. I'm gonna hike where the air is too thin to breathe and run 'til the proverbial wheels proverbially fall off.

"Corporal punishment," the narrator concedes, "is better than nothing."

That's reflection 1.

Reflection 2: Subaltern Theory

Bolivia and Peru are cool, wacky places. They have fantastic landscapes, good food, nice people, and a unique tie to their unique indigenous heritage. You see the branches and you see the roots and you see how they're connected, and it's a window into another world that leaves you feeling like what you thought was the whole puzzle was just one piece taped to your nose. Kinda.

Here's an example of the roots thing, which will hopefully connect back to the opening story of Luis the fisherman.

Bolivia has lots of different indigenous communities, but the two largest are the Aymara and the Quechua/Incas. One way the Incas preserved stories is through weaving -- indigenous weavers continue to embed designs into fabrics that relate important histories, and during a walking tour in Sucre I asked the guide if he could "read" a cloth hanging in a museum for me, and he did. He ran his hand over the images and he told me this story. Here's the tapestry; it's the column on the left, with the condor and the fox:

One day the condors were having a big party in the sky, and a condor approached the fox to invite him to join.

"There will be great food and drink and dancing," he said.

Of course, the fox wanted to join. "Carry me up, please!" he said.

The condor agreed, but on one condition. "Remember," he told the fox, "We have to come back before sunrise, otherwise we can't leave the upper world. So don't drink too much. When it's time to go, it's time to go."

"I can control myself," the fox said, and they flew into the sky.

At the party there was food and drink and music, and the fox ate and drank and danced all through the night. Eventually, the condor came to him.

"Fox, it's time to go. We have to go back to the middle world."

But the fox was dancing and having fun. "A little longer!" he said, and the condor walked away.

A while later the condor came again. "It's almost sunrise," he said. "We must go back."

But the fox, belly full of cold Bud Light, wanted to stay. "I'm not ready yet!" he said, and kept dancing. And the condor walked away.

The third time, the sky was just barely starting to lighten when the condor told the fox, "Fox, this is the last chance. If you don't come with me now, I'll leave you."

"Not yet, not yet," the fox said, still drinking.

The condor left the fox and returned back to the middle world.

The next morning the fox realized the party had ended. He looked around and there were no condors to take him back. He thought he would be stuck in the upper world, never to return to the earth, and he panicked. And so he decided to jump down.

The fox fell through the sky and back to the earth. There was nothing to soften his fall, so when he hit the ground his body ruptured. From his stomach the seeds of all the food he had eaten spread onto the earth, and from those seeds grew the plants and fruits that populate the land and which we eat today.

Huh.

Fables, in the western world, are morality tales. The tortoise and the hare teaches us not to rush, the shepherd and the wolf tells us that lying is wrong. We know these stories and we know what to expect from them, to such an extent that the mold is ingrained without us even really recognizing it.

Until we see an example that doesn't fit our archetype. What we expect from the condor and the fox is a tale about moderation -- don't drink too much or you miss your ride home. What we're given instead is a creation story, telling us essentially where edible plants come from -- not that we should be careful with alcohol. It breaks the mold.

It's a confusing feeling. The puzzle piece thing. You think you know what you're looking at, and suddenly it's like someone tells you you've been holding it upside down. So then you have to try to make sense of it.

One way is through a lens called "subaltern theory." Subaltern theory is a branch of postcolonial studies, and it argues that the way we think is inextricably linked to histories of power and dominance.

Subaltern theory argues that there are ruling classes and there are subaltern classes, and the stories and beliefs of the ruling classes define a nation: it's histories, it's accepted thought patterns, and who gets to participate. If you have two populations who use two different number-base systems, for example, and one population subjugates the other, their number system becomes the number system. One way of thinking becomes "knowledge," and the rest is classified as myth, legend, fantasy. When you have two forms of storytelling, one becomes a standardized, recognizable pattern, and the other feels confusing, almost erroneous.

In response, subaltern theory is an attempt towards bottom-up, populist history, privileging the stories of those excluded from dominant narratives. It's an attempt at broadening definitions of place and nation, which then generates more inclusivity. It's also a grappling with other worldviews and systems of thinking, which can be a real doozy.

An essential question of subaltern theory, which applies to the fox and the condor, is this: "We are Western people. How do we look at something from a non-Western gaze? How do we think about it without applying Western thought patterns?"

In a way, it's an impossible task. It's like asking you to look at an object with different colored eyeballs. You can't really just take yours out and switch them around like a plastic Mr. Potato Head.

Part of it is a realigning of the center. We want the condor and the fox to be a morality tale because we see it from the focus point of our lives, our experiences. We need instead to shuffle our feet.

The world works, I think, like this: we see ourselves at the giant planetary center of our universe, and every other place and group of people is way out in the periphery, a bunch of orbiting moons spinning in their irrelevance.

And then what happens is you go to those places, you step down on their dirt. And you realize that each one is the center of its own universe, too, and you look back at where you came from, your center, and you realize it's about the size of all the other moons. And if you could pull way back, way overhead, there wouldn't really be any of them in the middle, just a bunch of floating rocks all bouncing along.

In each place: origin stories, relationships, beliefs, thought patterns. Subaltern theory is an attempt to see them from their own turf.

That's the way it felt to go to all these places and run all these landscapes and meet all these people. Each place, each person, their own center. On one they tell you that the first two people emerged from an island, on another that plants come from a dead fox. There's God with a capital G and each mountain is a god, too. Spicy peppers give you energy, safety is a nation's biggest concern, the lake is holy, hot soup on a hot day.

And yes, a lot of times we can't really understand these things all the way. What is the fox and the condor really saying? How can we believe that the giant lake is really made from puma tears? It feels that, for all of our exercises in perspective, there is something fundamentally unknowable, that we can get close to another's thought but never truly inhabit it.

Here's the thing: We don't have to put all the puzzle pieces together, I think. It's enough to suspend our worldview, if only for a minute, and acknowledge the reality of other ones. It's enough to know that our little slice -- what we used to think was the entire picture -- isn't really the entirety, that there are other pieces we can hold to the light to see the curves and corners and intricacies we would have otherwise never known.

At the end of the day, Luis and I didn't get along because we agreed on the big things -- he and I are pretty different. We got along because we enjoyed little things. The silvery skin of a fish in the net. Jokes about relationships. Swimming in the lake.

Sometimes the little things are big, and the big things are small.

And that's all I've got.

-D