Machu Picchu Shuffle

Amos remembered that only six months before, he’d walked a mountaintop trail in the Andes…


The cloud that they’d been walking through all afternoon lifted just in time to reveal the sun going down. His legs were rubbery weak. There was a great relief in his bones and his heart that they’d found a place to camp. And what a place. It’d seemed like a gift from the ancient Andean ancestors.

Discouraged and tired they’d started back down the trail on the other side of the peak. It was getting dark and there was no patch of level ground that wasn’t strewn with rocks and boulders. What else could they do except keep trudging down the Inca trail? It was the end of their second day of walking. The trail had taken them up over one peak, then deep down into a lush forested valley, and back up,up,up to a second peak and down and up now through rain and thick mist to this third mountain pass.

With every step his knees would wobble. The pain had passed into weakness but now, descending, a new set of leg muscles were being asked to perform. For the ten thousandth time he wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d agreed to this mountain trek. The only exercise he’d had in the past winter was walking from his cab to the front door of his next customer. He’d developed a belly; a counterweight for the pack on his back perhaps, but it was just more dead weight for his sorry long legs. Pushing a gas peddle requires very little muscle tone. Pushing two hundred pounds up a bloody mountain is a different story.

The guys he was with, James and Andy, were in good shape. James, a high school buddy from Scarbro, was a construction carpenter. His legs were trusty tools he used for long hours every day. They’d met Andy in Cuzco. He was an Engineer for Shell Oil working out of Burma. It was a desk job but he was the kind of guy who sought out physical activity over drinking or spectator sports. He was in Cuzco to do the Inca trail so James and Amos invited him to join them. His legs, watching them pumping up the path in front of him, looked like hydraulic powered cord and pistons under skin.

Amos soon realized that there was no way he could keep up with his mates. At their pace, he had to stop every 50 steps because his lungs just kept running out of air. The mountain air had been thin in Cuzco. James had read that the trail would take them up to 4,200 metres. It felt to Amos like he was trying to suck oxygen out of the air with a straw and it seemed to be a rarer and rarer commodity – the bottom of the glass - with every step they climbed. He could tell that James and Andy were getting frustrated by his more frequent and lengthier stops. They were impatient to discover the mysteries of this ancient path.

The train out of Cuzco had dropped them at the spot reserved for the young gringo tourists. Young European and North American and Australian backpackers traveled a well worn path from one cheap hotel to youth hostel to cheap food spots along what the locals called the Gringo Trail. What the guide book didn’t tell you, the other travelers would – passing tips to each other as they crossed paths. Thousands of them every year all looking for the same things.

You could take the train’s first class car right to the foot of Machu Picchu and a tourist bus would haul your ass up to the “lost city”. You’d stroll through the site, snap a bunch of photos, get your photo taken beside a llama, buy an alpaca sweater in the tourist shop, and get back to town in time for dinner. But on the gringo trail you rode second class with the locals and their chickens and baskets full of produce and penny candies and even pots of hot cocoa tea. How those women made it from one end of the jam-packed train car to the other pouring tea into bright coloured plastic cups was a mystery to Amos - let alone how they managed to keep that tea hot.

The porters had pitched their giant packs off the luggage car railside and they’d made their way down a steep slope to where a river raged churning white and muddy through a deep gorge cutting them off from the mountain trail before they’d even begun. Smiling campesinos waved them over to a small platform at the gorge’s edge. A heavy steel cable ran from one side across to the other. From the cable hung a homemade steel and wood basket with not really enough room for the three of them, their packs and a family of forest dwellers on their way home. They paid him his 500 peso fee – pennies to them - and left their courage behind as the little platform swung out over the gorge. His partner pulled them across with a rope tied to the basket - suspended from a single wheel riding that cable a hundred, or was it a thousand, feet over the surge.

The smiling little guy from the mountain side got pulled back across by his buddy and they disappeared up across the train tracks til tomorrow’s batch of gringos arrived. There was obviously no turning back now. We’d crossed over. Civilization was cut off behind us by that angry mud-white river. A wide clear stone path into the jungle beckoned us back into time. The family had already disappeared along it before the boys had even hoisted their packs. They were suddenly ten years old and ready for adventure.

The boyish fun took Amos a good way into the jungle. Even when the trail began switching back and forth up inclines, his enthusiasm was enough to keep him pushing to keep up. At times they even had to use their hands to pull them up over the next scrabble of rocks and roots. What kind of trail was this? Then a burro and a mother and two little kids trotted past them. That inspired another surge of energy.

But by mid afternoon, Amos was just running out of steam. He had to take longer and longer breaks to stoke up another head of energy to get him marching on. When the frustration became loud on his compadres faces – they’d said nothing – he ordered them to stop waiting for him. “You guys go ahead at your own speed. There’s only one trail up here. I’ll catch you at our first camp. Have dinner ready eh”

It took no convincing to set them free. They hadn’t traveled across the globe to go slow. James and Andy were eating it up and hungry for more. This was the trail that warrior messengers ran with urgent news of the Incan kingdom. This trail crossed the whole range of the Andean mountains from Chile and Bolivia through Peru almost to Ecuador. Armies marched it to conquer and control an expanding kingdom centuries before any European set foot on it. This piece of the trail would take them to the most sacred site of the Empire. Machu Picchu – where the high priests sacrificed the best and brightest young specimens of their tribes to the sun god – trading bright futures of one in exchange for a Sun that would shine on the fortunes of a whole kingdom. Off my friends sprang into the dark, bloody history of the Inca trail.

Amos discovered something that he’d missed by trying to keep up. He discovered his own pace. Instead of throwing his hiking boot out to the full extent of his long leg, he simply brought it up beside the other and let it drop just a foot ahead. It was slow. It was progress. It felt right. It freed his mind. Instead of having to focus on the push, push, push of physical effort, the short-stepped trudge freed his mind to explore his surroundings. He fell into a pace that allowed him to lift his gaze from the path to look around and see. Right away he started noticing amazing details about his jungle path that had been a blur before.

How thick the moss grew on fallen trees. How it hung like a beard from crisscrossing deadfalls suspended, hung up by the branches of other trees off the forest floor. He noticed the tears dripping from those beards. Why were they crying? Crying to see this suburban invader bringing the most dreadful disease yet to the wild. Crying to see yet another member of the consumer culture scourge that had already infected this wild sacred place and would – within the lifetime of a jungle tree – become the killing cancer of the last age of earth.

Amos didn’t just notice what was around him. He started to notice what was going on inside too. The trudge was telling him about who he was. The slow, steady stomp of long heavy legs suited him. He was no gazelle. He was no monkey. He was a lumbering bear. He was destined to be a wise old Galapagos turtle carrying the ages on his back – hard to crack and full of observations that only the slow traveler will gather.

The more he reflected on how this pace was working for who he was, the more he started enjoying himself. Soon the music came. His whole body started getting into the slow steady beat, beat, beat of the path. He was into it. Amos even came up with a name for this dance of his. He’d call it the Macchu Picchu Shuffle. It would take him wherever he needed to go.

Rounding a bend he came upon James and Andy taking a break. He shuffled up to them and kept going right on by. “Hey boys” he said with an easy smile “Make way - I’m coming through” and through he stepped like a cat hip to a tune that they couldn’t hear. They passed him before he rounded the next bend but for all their quick starts and stops, Amos never stopped again all afternoon. The Shuffle carried him right up over the first amazing mountain pass –where he stopped to inhale the panoramic view of mountain ranges in every direction – and then down, down, down to a well worn dirt campsite where the boys had a fire blazing and a pot cooking dinner.

It was a restless night. Jungle noises are unfamiliar distractions for suburban boys. Amos could sleep through traffic and sirens and the beeps, buzzes, and hums of electronic conveniences. But the sounds of the forest kept his imagination going with theories of what creatures each snap in the woods and each chirp or growl or cry might belong to – and how desperate they might be for a taste of American beef. He dozed on and off. The tarp kept the drizzle that arrived before dawn off his sleeping bag and quietened the forest. Its peaceful patter gave him an hour or more of solid rest before the jungle choir - a thousand voices strong - woke him his facing breaking into a wide happy grin matched on the faces of his fellow warriors. Sunlight had made it’s way down into the valley to find their campsite while the sun itself remained hidden somewhere behind the next mountain they had to climb.

A quick meal, bread and jam and some cocoa tea sent them off on their quest. It was at least a three day journey and they had a lot of ground to cover. There was a steady stream of trekkers and you wanted to keep your place in line. Amos didn’t mind being overtaken by a pair of other gringos every so often. He was having way too much fun with the Shuffle. He soaked in every change in the forest as the trail took him through dense underbrush to great stands of mature mossy jungle where even the air seemed green. Over trickling clear streams washing bright gravel pebbles down to their destinies, then, into wide quick rivers where ropes strung across allowed the trekkers to wade hip deep safely through.

His steady unstopping pace allowed him to catch his mates where they stopped for extended rests at such picturesque places and they snapped photos of each other crossing the river, risking their necks on slippery rocks for the big payoff – stories to tell. Tell soulmates, tell children, tell the guy on the bunk next to them in the Salvation Army Shelter. Who knew what lay ahead for them? Their young legs took them further on to find out.

By midafternoon they got up above the treeline to where the trail started leveling off. It still dipped and turned but the switchbacks straightened out and they were now moving across a set of mountaintop ridges. A fog had descended onto them before they could reach sunshine. They could only catch glimpses of the distant terrain. Looking down from the trail they could see dizzying drops to rivers winding through the valleys. But the peaks on the other sides were up in the same cloud that they were walking through.

With fewer things to see, Amos spent more time looking in. He had to pay attention to where his feet were going. At times the trail grew thin along steep mountain flanks. The path was reinforced and widened in those places with the ancient stonework of the Incans. The same interlocking, mortarless stonework as the great ruins around Cuzco was evident in these mountain roads. They remained in tact centuries later. The masons had knit their stonework into the hillsides to become part of the mountain’s fabric.

As he made slow progress across the ridges he strolled back through time. He visited childhood friends and remembered people he hadn’t thought of in years. He remembered with thanks those teachers who had influenced him by recognizing who he was, appreciating his gifts, and encouraging him to keep growing. He stumbled upon those who had angered and hurt him. Ignorant bastards who had misunderstood him and thwarted him with pesky disciplines or worse – ignored him. He kicked at memories of those he had let down. Who saw great things in him but he’d disappointed by steering away from their high hopes to stay safe and alone with his own version of himself.

Amos had always shied away from success. It never seemed attractive enough to be worth all the hard work - giving up on his freedom to read stories and watch movies and just play with his thoughts and imaginings. Those teachers found him bright and quick and curious in a way that set him apart from most of his peers. The older he grew the fewer playmates he could find who wanted to venture into make believe and adventure. Boys turned their adventures into sports where there was little drama for him. He wasn’t fast enough or coordinated enough to play the hero and was relegated to the role of supporting or chasing down the heroes. Girls games turned into gossiping circles and he didn’t have the guts to engage in those bloody little dramas. He wasn’t a girly boy but he wasn’t a boy’s boy either.

So he worked for his teachers but he lived for his time alone with his musings. He made those teachers proud at times but they were always disappointed in the end. “If only he would apply himself” the report cards read year after year. His parents loved him the way he was – but, but, but they always tried to coax and cajole and even threaten him into achievements. Amos just kept trudging along looking for something out there to match the power of what was inside.

Instinctively he knew that he didn’t want to be the big success in other’s eyes. Instead he coveted the role of the hidden unlikely hero. The shepherd boy that only Samuel can see as King. The stable hand who without thinking or trying pulls the sword from the stone in an emergency – called upon to serve in a moment of need. No, the high road was not for him. He watched and waited and played the game as best he could – without heart or hope of winning. He would remain a loafer and aloof and alone.

Lost in these revelries, as he remembered, he discovered new insights about the boy he thought he knew. From this height on a mountain in the future, he could see how the boy had shaped the man and how the man was pushing those same roots deeper into the soil of destiny.

He’d written his Law entry exams that past winter, studying in the cab during long waits for the customer’s call. He’d done okay on it. Good enough to get him into one of the less prestigious schools and he’d sent off his applications to the three he thought would take him in. He didn’t want to be a lawyer but he couldn’t think of a better way to get to where he thought he was going. Advisors had told him that law was a good platform from which he could work out a career. It would lift him up to a professional strategic height and from there he could map out a path.

Amos heard footsteps behind him and voices higher and more lilting than the mostly male backpackers who he’d met so far. He paused at a wide place in the path and a young man with two young women approached and stopped to say hello. Their accents were French and they exchanged the usual questions and answers. Where was he from? And them? How long have you been traveling? You? Any good finds along the way? What’s next? Isn’t this great? They were Swiss it turned out. Nothing memorable about the one pair but he knew he would always remember the sweet angelic face of their companion. Her smile was warm as sunlight and her eyes lit him up from deep inside. It was her!

Secretly he’d pined for a woman who could see in him what others missed. Someone who served the same mission with a passion that would ignite his own. His girlfriend from University had been his first real love. Joanne was funny and earthy and best of all – undemanding. She could drink like a fish and enjoyed getting high just as much, and as often, as Amos. He often thought of her more as a buddy who he slept with than as a lover. She was a great traveling buddy but could never go deep down into the heart of things with him. When he got morose and philosophical she would joke and poke at make fun of him til he came around. That was good for Amos. They complemented one another. But, to his shame, he was still always searching for the one who would ignite his passion and purpose.

But of course he was tongue-tied beyond the usual gringo small talk and let her slip past up the trail. She took his heart with him and Amos spent much of the rest of the afternoon pursuing her. The thought of catching another glance and smile kept him amused as the day wore on and the incline started getting steep again. The path was switching back and forth in tighter patterns but it was hard to make out how high into the cloud they climb might go. It was a grey soup. A drizzle of rain accompanied the fog and he caught up with James and Andy at a campsite. They’d stopped to pull rain ponchos from their packs. There were three different small groups of packers all pulling gear from their packs. They were pulling out tents and starting to pitch them.

“It’s getting late” noted James. He was their navigator. He had the map and was tracking their progress. “This is the only campsite marked and then there’s nothing for a long ways”.
There sure isn’t much room here” noted Amos.
We might run out of daylight before we make the next one.
Should we try to jam in here or should we go back?

What sacrilege to suggest going back. There didn’t look like enough room here for the packers that had already started pitching camp let alone three more guys. They would have to go on and they would deal with whatever they found. Amos hated leaving behind his Swiss sweetheart and his big chance at romance. She’d given him another warm smile as he managed to bump into her with some lame smalltalk. The guys were waiting now. Off they went.

Turns out all three of them had been smitten by her. “She’s mine” each one protested as if they were laying claim to a newly discovered land. They walked on. The going got only slower and wetter. The climb was steeper and steeper with each switchback and the turns started coming sooner and sooner. Amos’ legs were giving out. Even the shuffle was hard to keep up. The shuffle was all his companions could muster too and even they were starting to complain between heavy gasps for the next lungfull.

They reached the summit in a total fog. A wind only blew in more cloud and rain and they only knew they were at the top because in every direction they stepped the mountain sloped away. All that effort and no panoramic payoff. No place to camp. No way to see what lay ahead. Just a great cloud of unknowing.

With no other choice - they started down. Amos was truly fearful that his legs were going to give out on him. He tried rallying his courage by swearing and cursing out loud and his companions joined in with a good round of complaints to the gods or anyone else listening. In that haze it felt as if angels could be just a few steps away and they would never know it.

They would never know it - except for the magical appearance of the stone stairway. They almost missed it. James and Andy marched right past it and so did Amos but he’d caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye and stopped in his tracks. Was that his imagination? He backed up a few steps and there, cut into an almost vertical rock face was a set of stairs going up into heaven. “Hey guys! Stop! You gotta check this out!”.

He waited until the three of them were huddled together on the narrow track and he got to see their eyes open wide in amazement. They dropped their packs and Amos claimed rights to be the first up. It was almost a ladder but each step was deep enough for an excellent footing and there was no fear involved. His heart beat fast with the adrenaline of discovery.

Just twenty steps up he stepped out onto a leveled grassy spot the size of a modest suburban living room. James and Andy were at his heels and they stood and staggered open-mouthed around the site. It was backed by a six foot wall and surrounding the half-moon of ground was a thigh high handcrafted stone wall. They laughed and hooted and slapped each other on the back and Amos thanked those that had been listening after all. This place was not on the map. This place was a gift.

The adrenaline still pumping, they climbed back down to get their packs and James thought he heard the trickle of a stream. He scrambled down as far as they had climbed up and found a stream of fresh water. As they pulled out their tarps and pots for cooking over the small firepit, Amos produced a surprise bottle of scotch. “Boys, I didn’t tell ya before, but today is my birthday.
No way! the guys exclaimed.
Yup - no longer a boy. I’m twenty one today.

And then, as Amos poured a round of drinks into tin cups, the curtain lifted - as if the experience had been staged and timed. The three of them turned, and in a silent awe, watched the wind take the cloud away to reveal a long deep valley before and beneath them. The sun was setting behind a set of peaks at the far distant end of it. From this spot they could survey all that the valley contained.

“This is a sentry post. declared James their guide in all things Incan. From here the sentries could keep an eye on anything coming or going towards Machu Picchu. They just shook their lucky little heads, took a seat on the ancient wall, sipped at the single malt and laughed and chuckled at their fortune as the light slowly took away the magnificent mirage.

They cooked a simple meal over the campfire and told stories while the stars arrived bright and blanketing the sky. They were all so exhausted from the day’s march that soon they climbed into their bags for sleep. But in spite of his weariness, sleep eluded Amos. He lay on his back examining the stars. They became the people of his past. As he focused on each one, or on a group, individuals came to mind. Soon they were beyond numbering. His heart swelled with a sense of the wealth of his inheritance.

The love and attention he’d been paid by so many. Even the challenge and abuse he’d received he valued as part of what had both hurt and hardened him. And along with this great wealth that filled him, there was also a great obligation that surfaced and expanded out into the sky. His future was out there beyond him. His manhood was waiting to be traveled and, whatever it held, he knew that it would both surprise and impress all who had known him. Impress them not so much with he might do - as with how the Creator had used him for something special, unusual for a Scarbro boy - more precious than simply success.

It was more of a feeling than a thought and he lay there in awe of what was being presented. He lay there for a long, long time. It held him and slowly became part of him. A transformation was under way in his DNA. It was either the aliens who’d inscribed the Nazca plains, or the Incan gods who accepted the potent blood of youth in exchange for life spilled and distributed, or it was the ancestors transforming his ideas about the childhood Jesus he’d known - into something only to be discovered much further down the trail. Whatever it was – it was both very real and very unreal and he knew only that it had changed him.

The next morning the guys were still laughing at their luck. Amos said nothing to his companions about his sleepless night and tried to see in their faces if they saw anything different about him. But they hadn’t, or didn’t, or surely couldn’t put it into words if they had, and they packed up slowly reluctant to leave the magic of this high, strategic, stronghold. They’d another day’s walk ahead before they’d reach Machu Picchu.

Amos traversed that long valley’s trail still shuffling along but with a light heart that carried the load. Now it felt like he was carrying his future on his back instead of his past and his mind roamed ahead trying to imagine what role he might play in the world. He knew that whatever it was, he would be accompanied by the mystery and magic that had revealed those stairs in the rock.

That night they camped on another height. This one was on the map. It looked down upon the sacred Machu Picchu like they were looking down from the Toronto Dominion tower at Nathan Phillips’ square below. The next day they would explore the famous ruins and join with all the world travelers who could tick off that visit as a wonder accomplished. But the mountains held another wonder for them first.

That night around the campfire, as Amos turned away and stood to pee out over the cliff, he stretched his back in an arc and looked skyward. There were no stars in the sky. Only clouds. But as Amos moved to turn back to the fire, he noticed that something also moved in the sky. Intuitively he lifted his arm and saw a dark arm raised on the cloud before him. He laughed and quickly shared this new magic with his friends. They played puppet shows into the night – silly with the thought that here they were - projected larger than life in the sky above world famous Machu Picchu. It was both fun and strange. Holy unreal - and simply explained.

In the morning they came down from the mountains and walked through the maze of stone walls. Amazed at the magic craft of stone age people - the combining of human skill and awesome natural beauty together in this remote jungle sanctuary. Mixing with middle-aged American and Japanese tourists muddied the pure spring water experience they’d shared on their trek. Amos knew that the ruins they walked among were only a human, if ancient, expression of the mystery hidden up among the mountain clouds of unknowing.

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