The following year, in a pilgrimage to the site in the middle of the Mexican desert, Agapito asked humbly into the fire that was burning entire agave plants, “Just what is meant by love and passion?”
As the fire dwindled to flickering coals, a large coal that was shaped like a heart replied, “Love without fire is cold, fire without love is scalding.” That morning, the scalding sun rose in the house of the peyote daemon Mescalito and singed his puffy green eyes.
Donkeys 101, Laughter and Other Facts of Everyday LifeIt was these experiences that led Agapito to Bolivia the following year. He was in San Juan near the Chilean border with his amigo Pimiento, with an ambitious plan to traverse 500 kilometers across the altiplano to “Learn about earth, horizons, the significance of the flying body and just what the hell the fire-heart was talking about.”
Agapito and Pimiento kept open their satchels of coca leaves and simultaneously removed the stems, chewed the leaves and smiled. Oh, the magic green mystery of the Andes that turns white as it moves north—revered for thousands of years, now banned by the very same culture that consume its ugliest face: cocaine. The ticket to American law school and Hollywood super-stardom, the dust that Freud blew into modern psychology, the secret of a Coca-Cola world. For Agapito and Pimiento’s sake they were in no way interested in cocaine. They were interested in coca, the mild herb that is gummed by mine-workers and gringo mountaineers alike.
San Juan was a clay and thatch village at the southern end of the Uyuni Salt Lake in Southwestern Bolivia, the largest in the world. Just outside San Juan they stumbled upon the necropolis of the Lipez people that had populated the land in the 1200’s C.E., 200 years before the Inca arrived; mummies were found buried beneath limestone tufts along with ceramics and llama-wool weavings. It was here, recognizing that the bodies were facing west (a fact actually explained by the toothless and coca-crazed Aymara man that watched over the grounds) that Agapito began to understand death and its relation to the movement of the heavens: for to gaze at the horizon as the sun sets is to experience death each day. This is what the Lipez people hoped would guide their deceased into the afterworld: the sun in its daily death on the western horizon.
Agapito stood in the crepuscular stillness, smiling with bits of green leaves stuck between his teeth and turned to Pimiento, “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Pimiento replied.
“Laughter, or kind of like a giddy scream like the ones I’d make as a kid when I’d get to the top of a rollercoaster,” he explained.
“No, I didn’t hear that. Is there an amusement park around here?” They looked around the desolate desert at the roof of the Americas. They counted seventy-two llamas, 108 thatch roofs, twenty-one colorful dresses and infinite space. No amusement park.
“It wasn’t an amusement park,” Agapito affirmed, “unless the sun carries some sort of amusement park on its fiery back. So I really think it was the SUN that was laughing! I think the whole universe heard it.”
“You’re nuts,” Pimiento complained, “let’s get to bed, we’ve got some burros to buy tomorrow bright and early.” Agapito smiled.
The night was filled with menacing thunder and in the not-so-bright but early morning they hopped on a pair of shoddy local mountain-bikes and headed to the neighboring town of Santiago where they hoped to buy three burros.
The first time Agapito went through the Altiplano on a tour four years earlier, he was amazed that they were fed quinoa, the hearty and healthy grain that was gaining popularity in health food stores across the U.S. He thought it was a special exotic vegetarian meal for tourists. His Aymara guide snarled to him that for three thousand years they ate quinoa with potatoes “every maldito day, you ignorant prick.”
Now he knew the truth about quinoa and noticed it growing ubiquitously on the plains below the potato fields that could be found in rock-walled plots through the hills. The combination of quinoa, potatoes, llamas and coca allowed life to thrive at over 15,000 feet. It could be said that the flower of quinoa, growing from a man’s chin, might resemble the bearded god Viracocha, patriarchal God of the Aymara and Incas, father of Pachamama. We will meet with him later, but for now must focus intently on the fact that quinoa and potatoes are carried to this day from fields to towns on the backs of the burros that Agapito and Pimiento were purchasing. Their backs were rubbed raw from the tons of harvest they would move each year from the lofty slopes. To remedy the chafing, locals apply llama lard to the affected area. Agapito and Pimiento knew they had strong burros by how severely their backs had been chafed.
As they loaded their gear, locals asked what they used those sharp points (ice axes and crampons and such) for. They replied with a spit of green saliva, “To measure the stars.” They were sincere too—what else would alpinists do on the steepest, highest and most terrifying pyramids of the world?
The Burden of the Beasts
“One thing to remember, a word to all aspiring donkey wrangler,” counseled Pimiento through the muffle of his coca wad in the plaza of San Pedro, the first town they came to after hiking 45 kilometers, “is that burros are real animals! They need food, rest and companionship just as we do. Treat your beasts of burden well lest your hearts be filled with the burden of the beasts!” The people of that town and almost the entire The Altiplano spoke not a word of Spanish, let alone English, yet they understood.
One short and squatty young lady with a bowler hat, an apron with pink roses, and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt, walked up and handed a llama fetus to Agapito. “Please give this to Viracocha when you see him,” she pleaded in Aymara. She smiled with two solitary gold teeth in her mouth and a long coca stem protruding from between them. Agapito understood not a word but would know what to do when the time came.
Leaving San Pedro the next day Agapito and Pimiento began to break the boundaries of civilization and peacefully live outside of time. They headed directly across the flat, bleached-white expanse of the Uyuni Salt Lake, 100 km wide—a dizzying spectacle of mirages and celestial landscapes. Agapito later described The Altiplano as “Nevada on steroids and peyote.” It had the desolation of that state but swollen to muscle-bound heights of over 20,000 feet with mountains, valleys and lakes of epic proportions. It was a twisted, warped and melting mineral landscape: bizarre long-necked camellids and oddly placed flamingos – like some kind of bio- and geological circus act. The center-stage of this extraordinary Altiplano circus was the Uyuni Salt Lake. It was the essence of purity, exemplifying whiteness. Horizons disappeared as they moved into its dish and their minds moved into equally hallucinogenic and boundless realms.
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