We Were Always Lost
Rebecca Johnson
The author (left) and friend horsing around with a donkey
Word Count 1,738
When I was 19, I dropped out of college to travel. It was one thing (in my mind) to travel the world in between things; it was quite another to get your college degree and then bum around. Of course, this thinking is absurd. I know that now. But when I was young, I was beholden to the ideas of adults. Also, to be honest, I was $900 short on the tuition I needed for my senior year. I could have asked my grandparents for the money but it would have been frowned upon. As family legend has it, when my grandfather needed money for college, “He plowed the back forty.” A horse may or may not have been involved.
While my friends labored over their senior theses, I went to work. In the 1980’s, there was no internet, so companies were mindlessly pouring their money into dozens of different women’s magazines. I worked for a particularly dopey one called “New Woman” which was owned by Rupert Murdoch when he was still married to the Australian novelist Anna Murdoch. Once, we ran a writing contest asking readers to send in the story of how they met their spouse. Guess who won?
I needed travel and tuition money but the pay was low, so I also freelanced for Cosmopolitan magazine where I was paid .25 for each unsolicited short story I read. I would take the #1 train from the Columbia campus on 116th street to 57th street, where the Hearst empire was located, and pick up shopping bags stuffed with stories. If I was lucky, I‘d catch a glimpse of the legendary Helen Gurley Brown wandering the halls with her colt legs in mini skirts. Mostly the writers were sending in thinly disguised versions of their own lives which were, let’s just say, less than riveting. There was a fair amount of bosom heaving. Also, a lot of them liked to add stickers of flowers next to the title. I once heard the agent Joni Evans describe coming across a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in the slush pile and deciding then and there that she would give up her own dreams of writing. That never happened to me, but sometimes I wish it had.
Most people I knew who traveled did a Eurail version of the Grand Tour of Europe, a tradition that began in the 16th century for the extremely wealthy. They’d visit the dusty churches and noted museums of Paris, Rome, and Venice, clutching a Baedeker and a few letters of introduction to minor nobility accompanied by a dotty aunt. Even in the 17th century it had a reputation for being a bit of a snooze. "The tour of Europe is a paltry thing", said one 18th century critic, "a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect.” These days, I love nothing more than sitting in those dusty churches, contemplating my mortality, but at 19, I wanted to climb mountains, scale ancient temples, travel down muddy rivers in dugout canoes. Also, I was a huge Gabriel Garcia Marquez fan. So, I chose Latin America which had the additional virtue of being much less expensive than Europe.
I had a friend, “K”, who was also struggling with her path in life and so I convinced her to come with me. We prevailed upon another friend who was doing a semester abroad studying liberation theology among the trashpickers in Brazil to join us for a stint. Today, she’s a lawyer for Citibank, but that’s another story.
K and I were good traveling companions. Tall, thin and blonde, she was both curious and adventurous but we definitely saw the world differently. This became obvious on our very first day in Lima, Peru where we were staying in the Miraflores section of town, an upper middle class neighborhood where the bougainvillea would lazily drop onto your plate. We were finishing our breakfast when an American man asked if he could join us. The guy was drug addict skinny with a Van Dyke beard, weird eyes and the numerals 666 tattooed on his knuckles because, as he explained, the Book of Revelations. He carried a cane which had a removable bottom which he unscrewed to show us the tip of a knife. Basically, he was the devil.
The devil told us a sad story of being robbed of all his cash on the street. This might well have been true. I had never been any place where the street level crime was so intense. One day, while walking on the street, a young man grabbed the thin gold chain off my neck. K, a sprinter in high school, gave chase but I told her to let it go. It had only cost $35 at the Metropolitan Museum of art gift shop. We had ketchup squirted on our backpacks multiple times. It’s an old pickpocket’s trick. You put your bag down to take a look and the thieves take off with it. The first time it happened, K, the sprinter, easily tackled the guy. After that, we carried all our bags in front of the body, which had the added benefit of making us look really ugly.
The devil asked if we could lend him some money and he would ABSOLUTELY pay us back as soon as he got to the states. Um, no? Nein, nyet. Not in a million years. I know a grifter when I meet one, but K. gave him two hundred dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I would have had to read 800 bad short stories to make two hundred dollars but her generosity was part of what I loved about her (except for when she accidentally gave away my swiss army knife, a gift from a beloved boyfriend but that, too, is another story). I also understood in that moment how differently we viewed the world—I came from a home where my parents were divorced and money was tight. K’s parents were married and her father was a successful venture capitalist with two vacation homes. Those things form you. They just do.
Needless to say, the devil never sent her the money.
In retrospect, the decision to travel around Peru in the 1980’s wasn’t the wisest decision. At the time, the Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), a Maoist terrorist organization started by a Peruvian philosophy professor was doing its best to overturn the government. Their numbers were small but their actions were disruptive—one of their favorite ploys was bombing electricity substations in order to plunge towns into darkness. Tourists were not, generally, their targets but a few days before we planned to take the train from the city of Cusco to the starting point for the Inca trail, they bombed the train. Seven people died.
The five day hike to Macchu Picchu, the ancient Incan city in the Andes mountains was going to be the high point of our trip. We had already met up with a motley assortment of hikers from other countries, rented a grubby tent, pooled our money for some donkeys to carry our backpacks and hired a few guides with machetes since robberies on the trail were common. We sat around Cusco, debating what to do. What, we figured, were the chances of them striking again within the week? Today, demand for the Inca trail is so intense the government has had to limit the number of hikers to 500 a day. All those feet were wearing down the miles of staircases set in stone by the Inca thousands of years earlier.
On our trip, we were literally the only hikers on the trail for those five days. It’s not a conventional strategy—visiting a spot days after a bloody bombing but it did yield a once in a lifetime opportunity to see one of the world’s most astonishing places in complete solitude. Another difference between K and I-- she stayed behind in Cusco because she hadn’t been able to get in touch with her parents to let them know she was not one of the 8 dead people on the train. When, two weeks later, I finally called my parents to let them know I, too, was not a dead person, they responded, “What bomb?”
Next, we headed to Bolivia, a landlocked mountainous country where we stuck out in in all sorts of way. Besides being white, we were tall. Most female Bolivian hovered around 5’ 4”. In addition, the native women had the odd habit of wearing English bowler hats on top of their braids and layers of skirts to make their hips appear as wide as possible. Supposedly, a supply of the hats was shipped to the workers who had been sent from England to build a railroad in the 19th century. The hats were too small for the Englishmen but the canny Bolivian shopkeepers persuaded the native women that tiny bowler hats were the height of fashion. To his day, the Aymara women of the region carry on this tradition.
One morning, we were standing on a street corner in the capital city of La Paz, waiting for the light to change, when a burgundy BMW pulled up next to us. That, in and of itself, was a surprise. Bolivia was a dirt poor country and , of the people lucky enough to have a car, most had beat up VW bugs. The window rolled down and a well dressed man in a suit and beard leaned over. “Hello!” he said in perfect English. “Are you lost?”
We were always lost. We might spring for an actual city map once we got to a town, but mostly we just squinted at the hand drawn maps in our battered copy of South America on a Shoestring and waited for someone to help.
“Get in,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”
In New York, if a man in a BMW told me to get in, I’d decline with varying degrees of civility. But that’s the thing about travel. It cracks you open. Besides, it was three against one and he was wearing a tie. As it turned out, “A” was a government official, some kind of undersecretary of mining who had a graduate degree from Harvard. He also had a German wife who had recently left him, so there was something sad in his eyes. He took us to lunch and we did our best to charm him.
Miner lesson
When he found out where we were staying, some grotty hostel where the rooms cost nothing, he insisted on paying for rooms at the Hilton, the tallest and swankest hotel in La Paz. I can’t believe we accepted his offer, but we did. We instantly tenementized our rooms by washing our undergarments in the sink and hanging them to dry throughout the room. The next day, he picked us up in his conspicuous BMW and took us to the Bolivian altiplano, an immense flat plateau that was once a deep lake in prehistoric times. Snowcapped volcanoes loomed in the distance but the ground itself was crusted with salt, which resembled frost on a winter day. Miraculously, a flock of wild flamingoes lived there in a shallow, blood red lake. Watching thousands of those elegant but dorky birds graze the vermillion algae was mesmerizing. A had business with some miners so he left us to wander the flats while he and the men talked. I have often wondered what it did for his reputation to show up to a business meeting with three young American women. When I decided to write this story, I googled him and easily found him on LinkedIn. Today, he’s a director of a mining company, his hair is white and his eyes are still sad.
We left La Paz for a six hour bus journey back to Peru but fifty miles out of town, the bus broke down. We all sat resignedly on the bus, waiting for the driver to fix it, the peasant women with their massive bundles of carrots and live chickens, the stoic men in their shoes made of old tires . We were in a rocky no man’s land with little to no other traffic, not a house or business in sight. The afternoon turned to evening and the temperature began to drop. Suddenly, an army jeep pulled up and three young men in army fatigues and shaved heads jumped out of the jeep. Apparently, news of the stranded turistas had spread.
“Our captain has sent us,” a solid young man with a pencil thin moustache informed us. “We have an empty barracks where you can stay the night and be warm.”
We conferred. Should we take him up on the offer? It had to be better than spending the night on the bus. Also, we might be able to catch a ride back to town from the army base. In my mind, I was picturing rows of empty bunkbeds like you see in those World War II movies. I could practically see Frank Sinatra bending over to shine his shoes. I looked at the other passengers, trying to discern some opinion over whether this was a good idea, but their faces were inscrutable.
We got in the jeep.
We realized our mistake as soon as we pulled up to a single ramshackle building lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. We were led to a room with three cots. No captain. No empty barracks. Just a remote army post where three men slept on three rusty cots. I had prided myself on being smarter than K when it came to the grifter in Lima, but in this instance I had been just as naïve. The three of us (our other friend had joined by then) sat as close together as we could on one of the beds, thigh pressed against thigh as the young men broke out a bottle of Fanta soda mixed with some kind of grain alcohol. We took tiny sips of the putrid drink to be polite. In addition, they seemed to have an endless supply of Parliament cigarettes which they continuously offered us. They spoke no English and I, alone, spoke a little Spanish so the conversation didn’t exactly flow.
To be fair, I think they were just lonely. Faced with the fortress of our unwilling flesh, they eventually passed out on the two cots and the three of us fell asleep on one of the cots, head to feet to head. If anyone moved, they fell off the bed. It made me think of the childhood song, “There were three in the bed and the little one said, roll over, roll over.” In the rosy light of predawn, someone roused us. The bus was fixed. The soldiers hustled us into a jeep and took us back to the road where, miraculously, the bus driver had patiently waited for our return. That’s the detail that kills me in the story.
When K married, I planned to regale the wedding guests with the story about the night we spent with the Bolivian army but her soon to be husband pulled me aside and asked me not to mention it in my toast. I was so bummed. Couldn’t he see how that night represented the best of our young and adventurous selves? Nowdays, when I travel, there’s a driver at baggage claim holding a sign with my family’s name on it. Even if we were on a bus that broke down in the middle of nowhere, everyone would whip out their phones and call for a taxi on What’s App. In the race to ease our journies, I fear we’ve erased some of the wonder that comes with being lost. As the travel writer Pico Iyer says, “(W)e travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down, get taken in and fall in love once more.”
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Vogue (contributing editor since 1999), Salon, Working Mother, etc. Johnson is also the author of the novel And Sometimes Why.
