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, the landscape at the last stop was positively precipitous. We scrambled from the train to a waiting bus – one that seemed to me to be pretty modern, next to the dismal train and its billowing, sooty smoke. The bus driver seemed even to me impossibly young – hardly much more than my 14 years. The ride up the side of the mountain was interminable and terrifying. I didn’t know a vehicle that big could bend itself in half and make turns that sharp. At break-neck speed. With a child at the wheel.

When we emerged from the bus we found ourselves in the parking lot of what appeared to be a very humble, early 20^th-Century structure. A porch spanned the whole front of the two-story building -- festooned with strings of lights and outfitted with tables and chairs. My sisters and I shared a room with twin beds and a cot, Mom and Dad had another and my grandparents a third – all on the second floor. For our party, there seemed just to be one bathroom and a hallway sink. A pair of American students were making do with cots set up between bedroom doors down one side of the hallway.

We had stepped back in time. But not to the days of the Ancients. We were squarely situated in the 1920’s. There were gin and tonics and Fanta Naranja on the porch over friendly conversation. Dinner was served family-style and featured something unremarkable, like a stew.  Mom, Dad, Pa and Gunkey played bridge under the yellow glow of those string lights while others read, played rummy or talked. The lights – indeed all the electricity – went off at about 10:30. And it was quiet. Deeply quiet. Quiet in a way that you don’t find in many places.

The next day, after breakfast, we walked up the hill to the base of the ruins. A storybook mist hung over the walls and collected in the open spaces. The carefully excavated ruins revealed acres of stone walls. Each stone still round, still robust even after millennia of weather and relative neglect. Some of the rooms were still largely intact with openings for windows. It was clearly abandoned, but it seemed so complete, so alive.

We moved quietly through the site, as though we were trespassing, as though we feared coming upon a resident. Or, that the resident might stumble upon us – uninvited guests. In fact, we did stumble upon a herd of llamas that inhabited Machu Picchu. My little sister paused in a crumbling doorway to peer at a baby llama and was nearly trampled (but for my badass Mom) by its protective Mama Llama.

But even with the drama of the trip, the time warp of our landing spot on that dark but convivial night; and even with the near-trauma of the clash of the babies -- llama to human, what I will remember most is the quiet. That all-encompassing, deep-down-in-your-bones quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t just imprint the imperfect memory of a 14-yr-old girl. But the kind of quiet that spans the millennia. The kind of quiet that transcends and mutes humanity’s incessant, ageless, ubiquitous noise. It seems funny to me that having experienced that kind of quiet, I’d have forgotten it. That it would take me another 40 years to recollect my first memory of that silken quiet and to remember its comfort. It also seems far-fetched to worry that this kind of quiet might reside only in the Andes.

My pledge with the recollection of this and other memories is to summon and garner the lessons missed and the images lost to the more dramatic impact of either natural or man-made monuments. And perhaps I just wasn’t old enough at 14 to be aware of the value – the necessity – of quiet. Perhaps that particular lesson got folded into and lost with the many other experiences and lessons to which I was exposed when my family traveled. But whatever the reason I missed them the first time around, I’m coming back through and gleaning the rest.

As for Machu Picchu, I’ll remember the minutiae – the students in the hallway, the orange soda on the porch while the adults played bridge. And the mist. The clinging, cool mist that protected the ruins and then parted to reveal some of its secrets. The comradery of sharing that lonely space. The drama of two maternal creatures – one human, one llama – protecting their babies. These memories might not constitute the still-round, still-robust stones perfectly united in a largely unwavering wall. Instead, these moments, these memories will honor and help me explore the life that still clung to the walls and moved through the spaces and murmured softly as the mists dissipated and the quiet descended as though a warm, enveloping blanket.