jet lag (story)

Jet lag
(co. m. h. monsein june,2009)
Now that I think of it there must be some cosmic connection between pilgrims and drug addicts: I mean almost all of my adult life I have been sorely drawn to mountains (the higher the better) in a thoreauian semi-spiritual quest, and yet it seems everywhere my spirit has led me has turned out to be surrounded by dens of iniquity.
First I went off from high school in western Pennsylvania to the University of Colorado in Boulder with the thing drawing me there being the front range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, only to find that just as I was arriving, Boulder was becoming the psychedelic capital of the free world: “I've been waiting so long to be where I'm going in the sunshine of your . . . “
So, in retrospect, it makes perfect sense that Bolivia in 1975/76 was filled to the brim with hippie types from Berkeley to Berlin who had come for one reason and one reason alone: Pure cheap cocaine! To be completely honest I, the dirty hippie that I was, did a line or two in a cheap hotel in La Paz and/or Cochabamba myself. But maybe a total of a half a dozen times in the course of almost a year in that beautiful mountainous land.
But most of the other young Americans and Europeans I ran into were having a ball: an ounce of unstepped-on Bolivian coke as white as an Andean glacier for about $125, mid 70's money. Lots of whacked out kids; lots of mashed down noses. (I wonder what ever happened to London Cecilia? ---great east-end accent--- who'd had a silver plate placed in her nose where the cartilage used to be. Yeah it always struck me as incredible that people could travel half way round the world to some of the most spectacular scenery on the whole damn planet and never once look farther than the end of their nose. Oh well, so it goes. . . . .
At any rate I was in Bolivia for the mountains. I'd spent a month living in the dilapidated gazebo of the old hacienda on the Island of the Sun in the middle of lake Titicaca; had walked down from the altiplano, over 17,000 ft. passes, all the way down to where the Amazon forest began, twice; and was now on my way to a tiny village 20 miles from the closest dirt road, a village famous for its weaving. Of course in general the Indian weaving from Bolivia was the best in all South America, and this village was famous for having the best weaving in all of Bolivia and I had the idea to combine a hike with a bit of shopping. I especially wanted to get a Chuspa--- a little lama wool bag for carrying coca leaves--- as the Chuspas from this village were famous for being the very unique. They were very tightly woven with mystical looking horse designs on them. Come to think of it, the folks from this village must have been well fascinated by the Spanish conquistadors because the men of the tribe still wore leather hats that looked just like those typical Spanish conquistadors helmets. (You know the ones that look almost like old fashioned football helmets, except for their shinny silver color and the raised metal fin down the middle.)
So there I was walking alone along an ancient trail, feeling pretty dam good about myself and life in general, carrying a good 40 or 50 lbs of stuff in my deeply loved Kelty pack.
Walking over high mountain passes was something I had become used to and the one I had just stopped at the top of was relatively short by Bolivian standards, 12000 ft or so. And as I sat there at the top of the pass admiring the far horizon, munching and sipping on one thing or another, over the last lip there emerged a pair of the local Indians. Two tiny little men with their leather conquistador hats and each of them carrying at least a hundred pounds of cargo in hand-woven woolen sheets tied across their backs. It was a humbling experience.
The Indians of this tribe were known to generally be a friendly lot, especially in recent years due to their new found, selling weavings to travelers and tourists, business; so they smiled at me and I back to them as they relieved themselves of their horrendous burdens and did their coca leaf ritual.
At the top of every pass in Bolivia there is a stone altar which has been placed there by thankful Indians to give those thanks to god or the gods, Pachamama, Mother Nature etc. for the gift of the coca leaf: The coca leaf that when chewed with a bit of chalk causes a chemical reaction like no other. Ironically enough the effect has very little to do with that of getting high on cocaine. It might be described a bit like having 6 espresso coffees on an empty stomach and then taking just one or two hits off a medium grade joint. But no, there's nothing like it and it does help you to feel strong against the mountains great gravity, and makes you forget hunger and carry on.
So when the ritual was quickly done and my two new hiking buddies offered me a chew, who was I to refuse. Actually we weren't able to communicate much, both them and me speaking a very funky broken Spanish, (their native tongue being a dialect of Amayra).
But it was cool. They had that “every thing is cool in the world vibe” you get from so many of the surviving tribal peoples of the world, and I think I gave them a piece of my apple.
Any way we're sitting up there at the top of the world and all of a sudden you can hear the distant sound of jet engines in the sky and then the sighting of a big old jet airliner on the horizon. And one of the Indians looks at me and timidly asks, “Is that how you got here, on one of those?”
“Yes, I responded.” And I was immediately getting ready to tell him all about the unique sensation of traveling at 600 miles an hour, 6 miles above the earth, when he said: “Weren't you worried that you would lose your soul?” And my airplane explanation got lost somewhere between my mind and my mouth.
All I could muster was, “Porque?”
“Well,” he said, “It looks to me that those things go very very very fast, and I don't think you soul can walk that fast.”
And as we picked up our loads and started on down the other side of the mountain I thought he might well be right.