Quiet
I spent the night at Machu Picchu. Traveling with my parents, sisters and mother’s parents, we were an unwieldy party of seven when we boarded ourselves and our luggage onto an ancient train with thread-bare seats. Women sold steaming ears of pale yellow corn wrapped in newspaper. Mom purchased some for herself and her mother through an open window on the train. As I remember it, Mom and Gunkey (my grandmother’s unlikely family name) seemed to scoff at conventional wisdom about the relative danger of eating corn from grubby sheets of cast-off Peruvian newspaper. I thought Mom and Gunkey were such badasses. I seem to remember that I got a bite, hoping perhaps to be a badass by association. We chugged and rumbled and rattled along in the train, kept company by dozens of people – some local, some assuredly not. It was a raucous atmosphere with lots of talking, correction at top volume of playful but unruly children and laughter. Already mountainous when we started the trip,