End of the Year: Pt. 3 - In the Dense Shadow

As we head north, the valley closes around us, surrounding our train with dark cliffs streaked with jagged lines of rough, sloughing stone. Sarah is asleep, or half-asleep, in the seat next to me as we slowly wind our way up the Urubamba, past rows of corn, past unknown villages, past everything I've left behind in Cuzco on the last day of the year. For a third day we were up at dawn, this time to catch the train to Aguas Calientes, the gateway city to Machu Picchu and, despite Sarah's example, the first switchbacks leading out of town do little to calm my restless left foot, tap-tapping away in harmony with the quiet monotony of the clickety-clack.

The color palette in the Urubamba is limited but by no means muted: rich jungle hues of every shade of green, thin wispy whites and greys in the clouds, and the roiling browns rushing over the gravel in the river. A bright fog covers the tops of the mountains, extending over the entire valley, reaching down in little tentacles of mist wherever a small stream has carved a notch in the hillside. The high forest trees - great, thin trunks with barely perceptible cones - give way at a train's pace to the lush complicated shapes of the cloud-covered jungle. The walls are closer now (it's becoming darker) and nothing reflects in the forest.
The ridgeline, the river, the sloping canyon - these things give form to the forest, but they are only the outlines of a great green organism devoid of order. The jungle is an incomprehensible landscape, a complete quiet world living by hidden rules. It is a tangled mass of lines and swirls, hanging vines and colored curling leaves, purple-petaled budding blooms. Trunks of trees are interrupted by the branches of another, an intertwined conversation in damp green wood. And everywhere, life - living things, breathing, absorbing, eating, dying, reaching towards the sky, snaking across the ground, doing as Nature in all her providence provides. It all cannot be appreciated or understood, only accepted. No matter what you tell me, what books you buy, what sites you show me, there is nothing that will make sense of that place, nothing in this world, and maybe nothing in the next.
I fell asleep, I believe, but by eleven, we stepped off the train into a light drizzle, into Aguas Calientes.

The city, even more so than Cuzco, exists solely for tourists to eat, sleep, and shop in, so I braced for the worst. But the market stalls are orderly, the streets largely quiet, the hostels freshly painted. Spurious claims of "sabor andino" aside, there isn't much to Aguas Calientes except for the queues and desires of the tourists, and even these come and go with the trains. I pretended to be a student at the information booth - a minor coup - and bought us tickets to the park. Soon we were climbing the hillside, heading up the mountain, straight up the Hiram Bingham Highway.
Machu Picchu disappeared from the world five hundred years ago, retreating back into the mists, each new vine a piece in an endless procession against remembrance. The Spanish never found it, never bothered in fact, as the Incans had already retreated into the high jungle at Vitcos and Vilcabamba to wage their futile wars. In the meantime, the jungle, held back only so well as a force can be repelled, brought Machu Picchu under its eternal anonymity. And so it was, or so it wasn't.

That is, until a blue-blood Bingham followed rumors of wonderful things deeper still. In a light rain he climbed a desolate path through the forest, upwards, to the silent splendor of a lost city - one that had never been lost and never been a city. Hiram Bingham had found it - even if he didn't know what he had found. In typical fashion, a Yale professorship awaited his return.
A harder rain fell on me as I climbed the first steps past the entrance into Machu Picchu. The narrow path is filled with tourists: scruffy backpackers, pressed khaki Kansans, Japanese tours marching in lockstep with their guide, a pair of aimless hippies. It's a sad irony I suppose, that a place famous for being remote can be so accessible to so many people. But what reality can tourism replicate? Should Bingham's tropical solitude be preserved, a city out of time, or is it better to resurrect hundreds of Incan courtesans with poncho-clad Germans clicking away on their Nikons, here and forever? Something about the place, something fundamental to its existence and history is lost with every pair of hopeful eyes, each taking a little more from the landscape.
Machu Picchu's location and architecture, its very concept is impressive in every way possible. The idea that a large mass of people could put so much brute force into a place, a single stone and the way of life it represents, is as astounding and as troubling as it is impressive. Did an Andean peasant ever take a break? And if he did, as he stood there, staring over the edge of the trail leading to the ultimate project of a society on an edge, did he wonder why he bothered at all? But what are we pushing for? What is our collective labor doing if not constructing impermanent monuments to our own acquiescence? Our greatest works will some day be swallowed by a digital jungle, our mummies long since placed in a museum, our loves waiting to be misconstrued by another blue-blood Bingham in over his head. None of these questions are particularly compelling, but in the rain, at 8000 feet, surrounded by an ever-dwindling number of wet tourists, they'll have to do.

By the late afternoon, the rain cleared just enough to let a downpour in. The quiet vistas of mountains and ruins gave way to a melancholy smear of grey and green, my dollar rain jacket started to fail, and Sarah and I left the park.
Three hours of train. Three hours of passing trees, briefly stated villages, failing light. We dipped down from the cloud forest to the humid land below, then onward through dry forest, sparse desert with shrubs like little explosions, straight rows of sweet corn. At dusk most of the tourist got off at some suburb to take the four sol buses back into town. I stayed on, and as the train went up and back through the darkness above Cuzco, past New Year's fires lit too early, I opened the window and just leaned out of it, the toasted blues of early night leading me back to Cuzco, back to everything I left behind on the last day of the year.