The Anatomy of Personal Transformation

At the risk of being *that* person, I’m going to tell you about a trip that changed my life forever.

Four years ago I stepped off a plane in Lima, Peru. I’d scarcely left the country before, and I’d certainly never gone by myself to South America. I was, in a word, terrified. But I’d borrowed a pack and some gear and had determined I’d try this new thing: backpacking. By hook or by crook, I would walk to Machu Picchu. No big deal.

If this sounds like a recipe for wasting death in the Andes, it could’ve been. Luckily, I found a friend who knew what he was doing.

The hostel I’d reserved in Lima offered a driver who’d pick you up at the airport. This was a relief, since the clamoring crowd of men - only men - shouting “You need taxi” and trying to steer me by the elbow made me want to reenter the airport and hop the next flight home. Victor held a sign with my name, and though he was a burly stranger with slicked hair and a leather jacket, I gratefully followed him. Turns out he was sweet as can be, and we chatted (me trying to tune up my rusty-ass Spanish) all the way downtown, high-rises and shuttered bodegas flying by in a neon blur.

The hostel itself left much to be desired. I was slung into a top bunk in a dark, carpeted room that smelled of mildew and b.o. It was late at night, and someone snored like a horse. I lay down in my clothes on the itchy mattress and barely slept. Was this a horrible mistake?

In the morning, sunlight flooded the common area, where a friendly Peruvian lady was setting out tea and rolls for breakfast. I signed the guest book, scanning to see who else was staying there. A couple of Belgians, an Australian or two, and a man from Portland, Oregon who listed his occupation as “ambiente.” The environment? I thought. Dude from Portland who works in an environmental field - I know the kind.

When a dark-haired guy came down the stairs in a t-shirt with a bike on it a few minutes later, I knew it was Monsieur Ambiente. At breakfast I introduced myself. Austin, Portland - same town, that’s cool. You’re traveling alone? Me too.

The friendly stringbean’s name was Nick.

But all my friends call me Nicky, he said.

So I was thinking of going on a little adventure today, I said. I read about this hole in the wall cafe that serves the best cortado in the city. You like coffee? Wanna come?

Duh! When do we leave?

Nick was game. Nick is always game. We’ve been friends for four years now, through backpacking trips in the Weminuche Wilderness and day hikes in Moab and miniature fox sightings on Catalina Island, and one of my favorite things about Nick - aside from his penchant for terrible/amazing puns - is that he’s always down for adventure. He, like me, will rearrange schedules and budgets and life in the name of that epic peak or prime beach campsite.

He was also down for the bigger adventure I soon proposed.

We had a fun day together in Lima (it was absolutely the best cortado, though I tried no other), then parted ways as he headed south to Arequipa and I headed inland to Cusco.

I took an overnight bus into the Sacred Valley. When I woke around dawn and pulled back the curtain, I almost wept. The green, steep mountains were unlike anything I’d ever seen - and so fucking big, their peaks were invisible in the mist. Suddenly I knew I’d come to the right place.

Fighting through an altitude headache, I trudged up ten zillion steps to my hostel, Hospedaje Inka, an old farm terraced into the ledges of San Blas, a neighborhood perched high above the city. From the yard, where chickens and sheep roamed under a line of clothes drying in the sun, I could see the crowded basin of the small metropolis and the mountains cradling it on all sides.

At night, the city lights were a blanket of stars below us. Because I was a woman traveling alone, or something (?), they gave me a private room, an unheated adobe cube with blankets so heavy I slept in a state of pleasurable paralysis. It was, like a monk’s cell, austerely beautiful.

The proprietor, Eloy, was a jovial Peruvian my dad’s age. His stern yet warm German wife, Ute (pronounced Oo-tay), joined him in Cusco half the year. Eloy’s older brother Julio, a hobbled man with bleary eyes who seemed “not all there” but who made the morning coffee with touching devotion, was a fixture on the couch in the kitchen. I loved them all. I loved the place. I loved my new friend Rosario, a jewelry designer living permanently at the hostel, who right away invited me to “los clubs” to learn salsa and the more obscure local dances, like huayno.

After a few days and a little research, I settled on my hike. Not the official Inca Trail, which required permits and guides secured half a year in advance, but a route called the Salkantay Trek, which made a wide arc past the 20,000 foot peak of the same name, meandering through remote villages and popping up over a pass across from Machu Picchu. It was five days, I wasn’t sure how many miles (now I’d say 50-some), and supposedly one of the hardest treks you could try. Perfect.

Wanna do this hike with me? I emailed Nick.

I’ll be on the next bus.

Thirty hours later, Nick showed up at the hostel door, fresh off his own all-night bus. The arrival of “un hombre para Kelly” provoked many giggles among Eloy and company.

Callate, I said. Es un amigo.

Good Catholics, they placed Nick in the boys’ dorm upstairs. As we headed out the next morning to rent the rest of our equipment from an outfitter near the plaza, Nick said,

So you’ve done a lot of backpacking?

Oh no, I said. This is my first trip.

What?! You’re kidding!

Nope.

Nick and I still laugh about how I “hoodwinked” him into teaching me to backpack by conveniently omitting the fact I’d never done it before.

Well, he said, laughing. No better way to learn, I guess.

We set off a couple days later, taking a bus to a train to a..van? I can’t remember completely, though I know we took one large passenger van that careened around cliffside hairpin turns and stopped in a village for over an hour, where we bought a common snack from the indigenous Quechua women who came to the windows: an ear of steamed yellow corn with a triangular wedge of soft cheese.

Choclo? They called in offering. Choclo con queso? Choclo?

Sure, why not.

It was, as corn on the cob snacks go, amazing.

By early afternoon, we washed up in the cobblestoned village of Mollepata, quite a few miles from the trailhead, where a man at a convenience store placed a phone call on our behalf. Soon we found ourselves in the backseat of a minivan with a husband and wife and their two small children. The father drove. The children asked us questions.

Is this legit, Nick whispered. Or are they gonna murder us and take our stuff?

They wouldn’t do it in front of the kids. Right?

When we got there and were not murdered, we tipped them handsomely, hugging the children goodbye. It wasn’t so much a trailhead as an arbitrary pulloff on a gravel road leading into the mountains - into, seemingly, oblivion. We’d read about how the trail was road for a stretch, though, so this seemed fine. A soccer match was underway on a nearby field, and the radio loudly blared an American song we knew well.

Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart, we sang, shouldering our packs and setting off.

I could easily belabor the story of this hike (could write, perhaps, a whole book about it), but that’s not my purpose here, so I’ll attempt to do something I’m awful at: being brief.

In short, it was AMAZING. We hiked to a small encampment in a green valley and climbed a slope to the brightest blue lake I’d ever seen. Twin waterfalls cascaded down the cliffs from the glacier above. We climbed to a 15,000 foot saddle facing 20,000-foot, snow-covered Salkantay, which conveniently disappeared in cloud at the moment of our summit. We befriended a group of Americans and Canadians who were doing the same route, but with guides and pack support; they were impressed with us, especially when - bowed under 40 or 50-lb packs - we passed them on the steepest section of trail (not even a humble brag, just a brag). We camped in a family’s yard in a small jungle town, and they made us a dinner of fresh trout from their “finca de trucha” (trout farm - really a small cement well in the garden). Their four year old daughter watched me purify water with my Steripen as if watching an alien spaceship land on her house.

One day, we hiked through clouds of golden butterflies. We befriended a German named Clemens who bored us with stories of his hiking injuries. “It vasn’t the ahnkle,” we still joke. “It vas de knee!” We camped on a property owned by a guy named Freddy, who had a gold front tooth and stayed up late telling stories and teaching us local politics. When we flushed out over a ridge at Llaktapata, a deserted and largely unknown ruin, we were looking across the valley at Machu Picchu itself, from there just a spine, a crumbling backbone of stone strung out on a distant ridge. It looked like a sleeping dragon. V. Lord of the Rings.

Holy shit, Nick said.

Look at what human beings can do.

Two days later we climbed the fabled steps to “the Peach” itself, which, after all we’d seen, felt crowded and overwhelming, like a Disney version of the lesser-known marvels we’d already passed. Oh well. A big dinner in Aguas Calientes down the hatch, and we hopped a train home to tell Ute and Eloy all about it. And Julio, who appeared, as ever, nonplussed.

Back in Cusco, my birthday arrived.

Tenemos que hacer una fogata! Eloy proclaimed.

So we had a bonfire, and Eloy almost burnt down the mountain but made sausages. Rosario put on music and induced everyone to dance, including a sweet French couple in their 70’s, and we drank a corn-based purple beverage called chicha morada, and it was altogether the best birthday I’ve had in a decade.

Earlier that day, I indulged in one of my favorite Cusco activities: attending mass at la Catedral. I’m not a Catholic, but I do have spiritual pretensions, and that cathedral had a male singer whose voice was heartbreakingly clear and pure. Even when I couldn’t understand him, I felt that he was speaking to my soul. And I loved the people in the pews, with their serious devotion, their formal clothes, their tears, their joy. He was speaking to them, too.

That day, in the sermon, the priest said one thing I heard clearly.

Si hay paz en su corazon, he said, seria paz en el mundo.

Oh, hell yeah.

If there is peace in your heart, there will be peace in the world.

I held that gem and repeated it to myself often in the following years, as life changed - and as I did.

Four years and many backpacking trips later, I realized I wanted to *be* outside - and not just for vacation. Like, always. So six months ago I moved to California and did that. This spring, I’ll (hopefully - fingers crossed) be a wilderness ranger in the Klamath National Forest.

I’ve been thinking lately about change. Not the kind that happens to you, like strep throat or the sudden disappearance of your cat, but the other kind. What do you call it? Evolution, maybe, though that seems too freighted with controversy. But that sometimes-incremental, sometimes-lightning-quick process by which we become altered, often so wildly that we wake up one day and think, Who am I? What is this life I’m now living?

In my case, the Zoolander / pool of water moments are often positive, like, “Who am I, and how did my life get so freakin’ cool?” Ha. Then of course there are the dark days in which I batter myself wretchedly for not having accomplished every life goal by age 35. Thankfully those are rare.

The other day I was talking to my friend Stacia, who had a baby over the summer. Baby Wallace.

What I wasn’t prepared for, she said. Is how much he changes, and how fast. It’s like every day he’s a new baby. And I’m looking at him like, Who are you? Do I even know you?

That’s amazing, I said. But isn’t that all people at any age? It’s just super obvious with babies because they’re physically changing.

That same day (big day for the telephone, I guess), I was talking to my friend Lindsey about what I call “women in their 30’s issues,” i.e. age and fertility. She told me that Chan Marshall, the singer from our beloved band Cat Power, had just had a baby naturally at the age of 43.

Or, I mean, “naturally,” Lindsey said. Who knows what kinds of interventions went down. But that baby came out of her body. At 43! It’s the new 23!

Perfect! I said. So I’ve got like six years to decide I’m ready. Thank fucking god!

Isn’t it crazy? We could be totally different people by then.

We will 100% be different people by then. That is the only certainty.

Change seems impossibly slow, if you’re as impatient as I can be. But looking back, life seems to have done a backflip, turned itself inside-out, shed its skin, or burned everything down and risen from the ashes...at least once or twice a decade.

This year, I moved to the west coast to work in public lands.

Four years ago I discovered backpacking in Peru.

Five years ago, I lived on an island and ran a nonprofit.

Eight years ago, I was waiting tables in Austin.

Twelve years ago I was going through a divorce.

Fifteen years ago, I was a college student writing poems and going to see indie bands in the basement of a sushi restaurant. Would I ever become, I wondered, a real writer (whatever that is)?

I think anyone could do this with her life and see similar metamorphoses. Could the me of fifteen years ago ever have foreseen that I’d be living in Southern Oregon, writing about hikes, planning to become a ranger and create an artists’ residency in a forest? Uh, heck no. But today would be equally incomprehensible to the self of five years ago, who thought I might live on that island for the rest of my life.

The future is unknown, unseeable. We cannot tell where life will take us, a fact that scares most people so much they assemble fortresses of false security in order to make life appear to stay put. And I may do that, too; I’d like a smidgen of that, because a little security is a balm to the spirit. I may stay in a place, get a steady job, find a partner, buy a house. That all sounds fine, in time.

But I won’t tell myself these things pin life down like a butterfly in a glass cabinet. I won’t imagine life can be held under my thumb; it is far too slippery. We are constantly changing, like sweet baby Wallace, who gets bigger every day, learns to smile, learns what language means and who loves him. I hope one day Wally goes to the Andes, and throws open a curtain, and feels his life tip over on its edge, the contents spilling out, making space for the person he’ll become.

Even when we stay right where we are, change happens: we age, we evolve (or refuse to evolve, thus shrivel), birth and death and weather happen. Light crosses the room, moves down the wall, and vanishes as the sun drops behind the mountain. Nothing stays put. Thank god for that, and thank god for Peru. It changed my life forever.