In 2002, I crossed the border into Perú from Ecuador at La Balsa. The journey from Baños took me through Cuenca, Vilcabamba and Loja. The river crossing consisted of a wooden raft hooked to a steel cable, manned by a guy with a long bamboo pole. Chachapoyas and the ruins at Kuelap were another day and several towns away.
On the Peruvian side of the river, I had to wait for the customs official who’d stepped out, people said, and would be back shortly. He eventually stepped into view, smoking a cigar, wearing a Micky Mouse T-shirt, strolling down the dirt road with a bunch of bananas over one shoulder, and a machete in the other.
At Kuelap I met my first llama. The complex of ruins sits on the top of a hill on a ridge overlooking a valley. They are all that remain of this walled city built by the Chachapoyas culture in 6th Century AD. Maybe the most remarkable thing about the citadel was the network of channels for water that ran through all of the circular ruins.
I spent the night there with the crew of archeologists and laborers in charge of maintaining and studying the grounds; and, the next day, I made my way down the hill to the river, found a cave with a subterranean river and another complex of circular ruins that spread all around the base of the citadel.
On a trail to the little town where I met the truck that eventually returned me to Chachapoyas, I found a fossil of a large snail. Long before the Inca Empire, and long before the 6th century Chachapoyas culture, this place had been covered by the sea––Aquarium to Terrarium––I lugged that fossil back with me to RI, where I gave it to my son Ezra.
When I painted this piece in 2006 or so, I saw it as a sketch for an 8 foot tall free-standing sculpture made of glazed steel, fiberglass and plexiglass. I wanted to create a piece of great girth and permanence––an objet d’art that would stick around for a while. The lower half of the piece was meant to be hollow with plexiglass sealing the interior from the elements. The upper half was meant to be a hollow, inverted pyramid––boca abierta.
I have always loved the look of these two pyramids tip-to-tip. I love the way the upper half opens to the heavens and the lower half is firmly grounded and sealed. Whereas the upper half is empty, open and plain, the lower is complex, full and closed to physical penetration. The plexiglass face of one side of the pyramid invites the viewer to get closer, to look inside.
The interior of the lower half was meant to be a complex of pyramidal shaped optical illusions. One pyramid might look as if it were convex, while another concave. Contiguous triangles of distinct colors could be viewed as forming overlapping and adjacent pyramids, each one demarcated according to the viewer’s perspective.
The enormity of the piece––that is the bulk of it, standing at 8 feet tall, with a maximum breadth of just under 3 feet at its polar opposite ends––combined with the slight angle and twist of the top half, was meant to look precarious; as if to say, “yes, come closer, take a good look inside, but beware, this structure is likely to topple at any moment.”
The rain arrived last night, announced itself on the window panes, and settled into the steady pitter-patter rhythm that greeted us this morning.
I dreamed of Lake Washington, where there’s a prehistoric forest at the bottom that dates back to the ice age.
A 500 year old sturgeon floated up to the surface one year when I was swimming there. I remember the lake grass grabbing my legs and pulling me back to shore.
Nearly 20 years ago, I landed in Portland, ME after a year-long trip through Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. I landed in Portland on St. Patrick’s day, and there were still a couple of feet of snow on the ground.
When I arrived in Portland, I had a backpack, a few bucks in my pocket and hopes of finding a job as soon as possible. My internal GPS led me to the waterfront and the old section of town, where I interviewed at a little restaurant called Perfetto’s––I tried getting on a lobster boat before that but was unsuccessful in that venture.
While I waited to hear back about potential jobs, I volunteered at a homeless shelter preparing large vats of soup for a considerable indigent urban population.
One day as I was waiting for the doors of the soup kitchen to open, I noticed a dead seagull in the gutter. It looked as if the bird had been run over. For a moment I identified with the seagull laying there flightless, flattened into the pavement, its grey and white feathers intermingled with shiny red offal, its yellowish beak slightly open––it looked to me as if its final breath had forced the beak open one last time.
I got the job at the restaurant and another at a bakery. The room I rented was about a half hour away on bike from my job on the waterfront. My commute started nearly everyday at 5am, when I went to work at the bakery. I learned to bake all manner of cakes, pies, brownies, and cookies. Then, after my 4-hour shift there, I rode over to Perfetto’s to prepare lunch for a bustling crowd.
I’ll always remember the chef complaining that my sidekick and I weren’t doing enough prep work during our shift. It made me so mad that from that point on we prepped our stations, prepped the chef’s station, the lunch and dinner menus, and I added baking fresh focaccia to the beginning of each shift. It wasn’t long before I got a raise and a lot more shifts, but it really wasn’t soon enough.
It was about that time that I decided to return to Ecuador to rent a restaurant for about a year. With all the extra shifts, a pay raise, and a second job, I was able to return to Ecuador in September of that year, with my son and my ex-wife. I paid for everything. Tickets, immunizations, passports––all the expenses associated with preparing for a year-long sojourn abroad.
When I think about it, the vision of that lifeless heap of seagull in the gutter led to a visceral existential transformation.
A bit more than a decade ago, on or around this date, we were called to Montréal, Canada. To be more specific, Z was called to a conference in Montréal. I went along for the ride. We drove from Newport in what seemed like very little time at all––I think we spent just a bit more than 8 hours in the car. While Z attended the conference, I explored the city looking for places to have cocktails and dine later in the evening.
I set out the first day in search of the final resting place of Émile Nelligan, one of Francophone Québec’s most celebrated, if not most controversial, symbolist poets. My first search took me to the waterfront, where I found the Hotel Nelligan nestled in the heart of Vieux-Montréal. If you haven’t been, that area of Montréal is a bustling tourist quarter with cobbled streets lined with restaurants and pubs.
Mont Royale. My second day out I pointed the rental car in the direction of Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges. I found Nelligan’s tombstone and fulfilled one of the items on my undergrad bucket list: to recite a poem of my own at his grave. I don’t much remember how it goes now, but I recall that I alluded to big black crows on horseback, which featured prominently in many of Nelligan’s poems.
While I was in the neighborhood, I sought out Au Pied du Cochon, a restaurant Anthony Bourdain had popped into the venue for one of his “No Reservations” episodes. So I did the same. Things had changed since Bourdain’s visit. The place was booked solid. I asked for reservations anyway, and was told we would have to come back next week. When I explained, in French with a feigned Irish accent, that I was a chef and we had traveled a long way to taste the fare, I was told they would make an exception for us; we could come back at 6pm (early) and sit at the bar.
We returned at the appointed time and found the restaurant already full to overflowing. We made our way in and were met halfway by the same woman with whom I’d made arrangements earlier. She smiled and led us to our seats at the bar. Our seats looked right into the kitchen. The chefs were working right behind the counter. We could hear them as they spoke with each other in French and English. They likewise held conversations with us and other customers as they plated. One of them took our order for drinks and an appetizer of terrine de foie gras. Foie gras was featured in every course. My meal was not all that memorable, but Z ordered the Duck in a Can. The server opened it with a can opener right in front of us, then poured its contents onto the 1/2 inch thick slice of grilled bread on Z’s plate––confit of duck, mashed potatoes, Demi-glace, and foie gras. An amazing meal, an amazing memory.
The gate to my grandparent’s backyard was off limits to me and my brother. It opened on to an alley that connected to a street that ran perpendicular to Krameria, the street where my grandparents lived in Denver, Colorado. I don’t recall if the side street was 21st or 22nd street, but on the corner, to the right of the mouth of the alley, there was a little store that sold everything from Coca Cola to pumpernickel. We used to walk over there with my dad and my grandfather to get candy and ice cream.
To get to the back gate, you had to walk down a narrow path of grass that started at the edge of the patio. You had to walk between row after row of roses my grandfather had planted for my grandmother. I would walk back there with my little brother and Snookers, my grandmother’s dog, to look at and smell all the roses. To this day the mix of dog, dew, and roses instantly returns me to my 3- or 4-year-old self.
My grandparents lived in a little brick house in a middle-class neighborhood not far from Denver’s East High School. The big front porch and the stateliness of its brick construction made the house seem enormous to me.
My brother and I loved to play on the large cement front porch. An enormous yew to one side of the front door had grown over the side where my grandparents’ bedroom window was.
When I returned years later to see the house––it was after my grandparents had passed away and my parents had divorced––I couldn’t believe how tiny the house seemed. The yew was gone, the front porch smaller than I remembered.
We’ve all experienced it, the feeling that objects appear smaller or larger, or appear to be closer or farther than they actually are. When we view the world as children, everything seems bigger and more wondrous because everything is bigger and more wondrous. With age, I’m sad to say, some things diminish in size and wonder.
I may be mistaken, but maybe––just maybe––the key to happiness is seeing the world through fresh eyes every day. Perhaps we need to remember to view things as if for the very first time, as if we are children again. In fact, maybe what’s really weird is to exist in the humdrum, to never look up to see the magic of a tree holding up a piece of sky. Maybe what we need––what the world needs––is for everyone to look around at the magically vast, whacky, and wonderful world we live in and exhale while uttering, “I be dreamin’.”
In 2002, I traveled to La Paz, Bolivia from Puno, Perú, as part of a nearly year-long trip that began and ended in Ecuador, passing through Argentina and Chile along the way. On one leg of that journey, I spent several weeks in Copacabana and Sorata, Bolivia.
On the rickety bus ride from Puno to Copacabana, we sat with colorfully dressed locals, guinea pigs and chickens. Donkeys and llamas peppered the landscape, alongside thatched huts with mud walls. We were surrounded by massive snow peaked mountains.
The town of Copacabana was one long strip of hip tourist joints that fanned out to host 6,000 residents who primarily catered to backpackers from all over the world and folks who made the annual pilgrimage to La Basílica de la Virgen de la Candelaria de Copacabana, a cathedral built in the Moorish style in 1550.
The main road leads down to the shores of Lake Titicaca, where one day we rented a small sailboat for an hour or so. We did our laundry that day, so I had wrapped a KLM blanket around my loins and bargained for use of the boat. The lake is massive. Later, we took a water taxi from Copacabana out to Isla del Sol, the birthplace of the Inca.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Isla del Sol was its verticality. Stairs were chiseled right into the hillside that led to the hostel where we stayed. It was also cold and windy on the island. The sun set at about 6pm, at which time the temperatures dropped even more. I recall feeling closer to the heavens than anywhere I’d ever been. And I saw celestial bodies I’d never seen before.
The view from our room looked out across the lake to our next destination: Sorata. In most small towns, mornings were markedly noisy, made all the louder by the crowing of roosters greeting the dawn. I remember how quiet it was on the island. There was none of the crowing to which I’d become accustomed. Breakfast consisted of cereal, yogurt, toast and trout, served with coffee and fresh squeezed, pulped or pureed juice. Lunchtime menus featured trout and potatoes, usually cut into fries, salad and rice. There was usually a soup that came with the meal and a refresco. Dinner was much the same, with a few western dishes thrown in: pasta, pizza, steak. I don’t remember hearing or seeing a single chicken.
There are preColumbian ruins on the island. We found a spot not far from a deserted beach where circular ruins overlooked the lake. It was then that we popped into the lake. I had never skinny-dipped at an elevation even remotely close to 2.36 miles (12,507ft). And yes, the water was extremely cold.
From Copacabana we took a series of buses to get to Sorata, which is to the north and east of the lake, nestled in the mountains we could see from our lodgings on Isla del Sol. Our bus drove over the altiplano through a dense fog. The driver didn’t seem to notice and barreled around curves at a frightening speed. I couldn’t see anything beyond the windows of the bus. No land. No sky. No horizon. Only a forward motion, and that feeling you get when your eyes are closed but you know you’re turning. Several Israelis were onboard and were more vocal about their concern that we might drive off the road. Calls for the driver to slow down roared from the passengers. Yet the driver told everyone to quiet down, he knew what he was doing.
As the day turned to dusk, then nightfall, we began the descent into a little valley where we were deposited onto a small plaza at the center of town. We were utterly knackered and were lucky to find a room. The next day we found a guide to take us on a three-day trek into the mountains. It was a steep, steep trek to Laguna Chillata, at an elevation of 3.12 miles (16, 503ft), and ultimately to Laguna Glaciar at the same altitude.
We ate a lot of instant noodle soups, oatmeal and these amazing little lightweight peanut brittle bars made by the locals in Sorata. We also packed hard-boiled eggs and tea. The vertical landscape was breathtaking––a bit like walking through the set of a Lord of the Rings film.
My grandfather, Tranquilino Xavier Crespin, was born in San Geronimo, New Mexico in 1900, before New Mexico was even part of the United States. New Mexico wouldn’t become a state until he turned 12 years old.
Like all of my mother’s family, he grew up speaking Spanish in a place where the border––the tortilla curtain, as some have referred to it––had been etched into the red earth and creosote covered cañones by the US and México, an imaginary line in a land where he and his forbears had dwelled for as long as anyone could remember.
My abuelito eventually moved the family to Loveland, Colorado, but he found work further north in Wyoming, away from my abuelita Arculiana and the rest of the family. I remember visiting my abuelito a couple of times on the prairie in Wyoming; however, he also visited us in Eugene, Oregon several times when I was a kid. I remember that he didn’t drink, but when my father offered him a beer, he added salt to it. My brother and I got a kick out of the way the beer would fizz up when he added the salt, and he would rush to sip the beer suds before they overflowed, some of the suds clinging to his thin moustache. He let me taste the beer once. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I recall that it tasted a lot better than the cigarette-butt swig from a beer can I took after one of my parents’ big parties. It was the 60s. There were a lot of parties, and I never did that again.
I don’t remember any of my abuelito’s stories because I was raised in an anglophone house and wouldn’t have understood them even if I’d tried. Sure, my mom spoke Spanish since childhood, and my dad was a high school teacher of Spanish; but our grade schools didn’t introduce Spanish language instruction until 4th grade. There was a family who produced and starred in a TV mini-series designed to introduce elementary students to Spanish. The two brothers and sister went to school with us at a local elementary school. It was the closest I’d ever got to anyone remotely “famous.”
My abuelito didn’t talk much. He lived a rugged life, most of the time in solitude, away from other people and the hustle bustle of life in towns and cities. He lived in a Sheep Wagon on the prairie in Wyoming, where he cared for sheep year in and year out. He taught us to leg wrestle and skip stones. He was a good whistler and made coffee the old-fashioned way, over a campfire, with eggshells.
He did a lot of things he never got credit for and eventually had to retire after he was thrown from his horse. Apparently, his horse was spooked, threw him to the cold morning ground, and then fell upon him, breaking his pelvis.
My abuelito signed everything with an “X”. He never learned to read or write in English or Spanish. But family who grew up close to him say that after dark he could be heard from time-to-time chanting in foreign tongues that were neither English nor Spanish. Some say he was chanting in Native American songscapes.
As a young adult, I thought of sleep as a potential destination, a place where dreams and adventures would come true. Slumber was a means of escaping the confusion and tumult of everyday life. I relished the moment when my head would hit the pillow. I looked forward to the moment when I would drift out of consciousness and my passport to the land of Nod got stamped.
In the physical world. My father was always taking trips to Mexico, Guatemala and Europe. We never got to go along, because it was too expensive for a high school teacher to take the family along. So, he always came home from far away lands with gifts for us. One time it was a marimba from Guatemala; the next it was a serape from Mexico; another time, he brought home a flamenco guitar from Cordoba, Spain. Those trips, and the items he brought home from them, inspired me later in life to travel as much as I could.
On one of my father’s trips to Guatemala, he befriended a brujo/witch doctor in the Sierra. He was offered access to a ritual involving chanting and the burning of pine resin. My father filmed the ritual, then returned home with bags upon bags of pine resin. On another trip to Guatemala, my father filmed military processions in Guatemala City. I wonder if he knew about the genocide that was taking place in the Sierra at that time.
One time, I remember my father was nearing the end of his MA program. He and my mother hosted a big party. It was 1969-70, and all of his associates at the university came to the house. Food and wine and conversation flowed freely. English, Spanish, Spanglish––it was a hodgepodge of cultural mingling, all under one roof.
Passport(s). I have learned a lot about myself over the years from travel in foreign lands far from home. I have met and been befriended by many wonderful people too numerous to list here. Those experiences have shaped me and made me who I am today. My father’s example(s) likewise shaped me in ways that continue to surprise me.
I received my father’s passport in the mail today. It came with a sheaf of official documents from the US Embassy and the hospital where my father spent the last days of his life. He won’t need his passport anymore. He won’t need it for where he is going, as some travel requires no authorization. I have been wrapping up the final details of his life, and I am humbled at the way his adventurous life has been reduced to bank account and social security numbers, and I am saddened. I celebrate you now, dear father. Happy travels!
Reflections from the Colonial Divide 