Read Online The Coat Route by Meg Lukens Noonan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Meg Lukens Noonan
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normal working hours—that’s the challenge.
J ane and Raul live in a gated neighborhood above Pachacamac, a scrubby agricultural community south of Lima. When Jane drives toward the gatehouse, a guard comes out and lifts the spindlypole and waves her through. The security measures are reminders that this area was a hotbed of Sendero Luminoso—Shining Path—terrorist activity not too long ago. In 1992, the town’s deputy mayor, Maria Elena Moyano, was murdered at a community barbecue.
The terrorists have retreated to the jungle, and these days the friction on Jane and Raul’s street is apt to be over whose turn it is to get the irrigation water that is piped into the cement culverts that border the small fenced yards. Water from the Lurín River sustains a small garden behind Jane’s one-story L-shaped adobe house. We walk out to the back yard and she shows me rows of manioc, lettuce, and squash. One spindly raspberry bush is propped up on a stake. In the front yard, hutches hold six guinea pigs and four rabbits—refugees from Raul’s vaccination experiments. Gray doves, which sing monotonous, pan-fluty notes from dawn to dark, flit in the bushes.
Wheeler and Rosadio live in a world where ancient things are as common as gravel. Just down the road from their place—past the
chicharonnerias
selling fried pork rind and the farm stands and the empty lot where a dusty white llama sleeps among the rubble and the weeds—are the Pachacamac ruins, hundreds of acres of half-excavated ceremonial grounds and temples that date back to A.D . 200.
We drive by the ruins on our way to the office to pick up some CONOPA crew members for the trip into the mountains. “That’s Pachacamac,” Jane says, as if she were showing me where a new Wong’s supermarket was going to be. From the road, it looks like a pockmarked sand hill surrounded by an abandoned construction site. “It’s as significant as Machu Picchu.”
By midafternoon, we and the CONOPA guys are speeding south, the chaos of Lima behind us. Under low clouds, the highwayis a dark ribbon riding the contours of the desert coast: to our left, dunes corrugated by wind; to our right, the gray Pacific, creased by swells. I am in the backseat of the truck, one gear bag on my lap, another at my feet. Jane, holding a bag of groceries, is wedged between Andres, a long-legged Spanish vet student, and me. Two young men who are part of the field staff are up front: Alvaro, bearded and intense, is driving, and Antony, boyish and smiley, is riding shotgun. Only Jane and I speak English, but she has been conversing in Spanish for most of the trip so far. I have tried to catch scraps of recognizable words, but I’ve given up. They talk too fast and I have a headache.
Out my window, a cluster of decrepit shanties flashes by, then the quick colors of a lone fruit stand, the haunches of a scrounging dog, a bus barreling north, then more sand. I have read that this is one of the most arid places in the world, so dry that corpses dehydrate and mummify before they can decompose.
The monotony of the drive is interrupted by the frequent freight-train rumbling of big-rig trucks, whose drivers seem to keep themselves awake with adrenaline shots fueled by the thrill of passing us on the blindest of curves. This, I will learn as we make our way into the mountains, is a signature Peruvian move.
“Oh,
mi Dios
,” I say, covering my eyes in the middle of one particularly risky-looking maneuver.
“Sí, sí, mi Dios,”
Alvaro repeats, laughing. “
Mi Dios
.” The others smile and nod. I am happy to have amused the crew, but what I’m really thinking is, Please do not let me die on a highway in Peru.
More sand, more ocean, more crazy truck drivers, more sand—and then the surprise of green. We have reached the outskirts of Chincha, a coastal town that has the one thing that changes life in an arid land—a ribbon of river water. From whereit began as snowmelt in the Andes, this water has
J ane and Raul live in a gated neighborhood above Pachacamac, a scrubby agricultural community south of Lima. When Jane drives toward the gatehouse, a guard comes out and lifts the spindlypole and waves her through. The security measures are reminders that this area was a hotbed of Sendero Luminoso—Shining Path—terrorist activity not too long ago. In 1992, the town’s deputy mayor, Maria Elena Moyano, was murdered at a community barbecue.
The terrorists have retreated to the jungle, and these days the friction on Jane and Raul’s street is apt to be over whose turn it is to get the irrigation water that is piped into the cement culverts that border the small fenced yards. Water from the Lurín River sustains a small garden behind Jane’s one-story L-shaped adobe house. We walk out to the back yard and she shows me rows of manioc, lettuce, and squash. One spindly raspberry bush is propped up on a stake. In the front yard, hutches hold six guinea pigs and four rabbits—refugees from Raul’s vaccination experiments. Gray doves, which sing monotonous, pan-fluty notes from dawn to dark, flit in the bushes.
Wheeler and Rosadio live in a world where ancient things are as common as gravel. Just down the road from their place—past the
chicharonnerias
selling fried pork rind and the farm stands and the empty lot where a dusty white llama sleeps among the rubble and the weeds—are the Pachacamac ruins, hundreds of acres of half-excavated ceremonial grounds and temples that date back to A.D . 200.
We drive by the ruins on our way to the office to pick up some CONOPA crew members for the trip into the mountains. “That’s Pachacamac,” Jane says, as if she were showing me where a new Wong’s supermarket was going to be. From the road, it looks like a pockmarked sand hill surrounded by an abandoned construction site. “It’s as significant as Machu Picchu.”
By midafternoon, we and the CONOPA guys are speeding south, the chaos of Lima behind us. Under low clouds, the highwayis a dark ribbon riding the contours of the desert coast: to our left, dunes corrugated by wind; to our right, the gray Pacific, creased by swells. I am in the backseat of the truck, one gear bag on my lap, another at my feet. Jane, holding a bag of groceries, is wedged between Andres, a long-legged Spanish vet student, and me. Two young men who are part of the field staff are up front: Alvaro, bearded and intense, is driving, and Antony, boyish and smiley, is riding shotgun. Only Jane and I speak English, but she has been conversing in Spanish for most of the trip so far. I have tried to catch scraps of recognizable words, but I’ve given up. They talk too fast and I have a headache.
Out my window, a cluster of decrepit shanties flashes by, then the quick colors of a lone fruit stand, the haunches of a scrounging dog, a bus barreling north, then more sand. I have read that this is one of the most arid places in the world, so dry that corpses dehydrate and mummify before they can decompose.
The monotony of the drive is interrupted by the frequent freight-train rumbling of big-rig trucks, whose drivers seem to keep themselves awake with adrenaline shots fueled by the thrill of passing us on the blindest of curves. This, I will learn as we make our way into the mountains, is a signature Peruvian move.
“Oh,
mi Dios
,” I say, covering my eyes in the middle of one particularly risky-looking maneuver.
“Sí, sí, mi Dios,”
Alvaro repeats, laughing. “
Mi Dios
.” The others smile and nod. I am happy to have amused the crew, but what I’m really thinking is, Please do not let me die on a highway in Peru.
More sand, more ocean, more crazy truck drivers, more sand—and then the surprise of green. We have reached the outskirts of Chincha, a coastal town that has the one thing that changes life in an arid land—a ribbon of river water. From whereit began as snowmelt in the Andes, this water has
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