Bodily Breakdown on the Inca Trail

By Alexis Coe

The intense throbbing in the front of my head was rapidly spreading. The trickle of pain gained momentum, washing down the back of my neck. My face felt scorched, and my toes glacial. Underneath two sleeping bags, I heard the rest of my group observing the sunset.

I couldn’t stand up to join them. I was too busy gulping at the thin air. In between breaths, I tried to take stock of all of the things simultaneously occurring in my body. I wound myself into a compact ball and cursed the very body that had just gotten me to the first base camp high in the Andean mountains. Every part of me seemed to be revolting in an incoherent mutiny.

I could have called out to my husband, or our guides, Javier and Edwin, but I kept quiet and thought of another man, one I had only met once in a city halfway around the around the world.

“There is no such thing as bad weather,” a hirsute employee at an outdoor store near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco warned me, before delivering the sage, albeit expensive punch line: “only bad gear.” I left with a myriad of products promising to wick, warm, cool, and dry me.

And they had not failed me, from the 5:30 a.m. chill to the internal heat I built ascending more than 13,700 feet over eight hours of lung-straining hiking. Everything I paid for—the tickets to another continent, permits from Peruvian government, the trekking company’s promise of good food, guides, and porters, and that highly specific gear—had delivered beyond expectation.

There was only one thing thwarting my trek along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and it was me.

Flashback
Just an hour earlier, I was among the first to arrive alongside a quartet of same-aged men from Manhattan, a city I had abounded a year earlier. After we threw down our backpacks and took pictures, a deck of cards materialized. Their bodies were suddenly prostrated, face down on the ground, not from exhaustion but virile competition. With varying form, they completed rounds of pushups according to the luck of the draw.

Spectacles and tomfoolery aside, I understood something fundamental about this group of recent MBA graduates, with their eye-on-the-main chance demeanor. They demanded that their bodies perform under pressure, and were relieved at their capacity.

I had also arrived in Peru full of expectations and foregone conclusions, ones that started to unravel as soon as the first card hit the ground. This trip would be safely epic, meaning devoid of epiphanies I found trite, and no calamities due to mistakes, whether it be forgetting a passport or getting robbed on an empty street at night. Physically, it was supposed to be a moderate challenge. My own mother-in-law had walked the very same trail five years earlier. She dismissed it as far easier than a day hike we had done together through the Bavarian Alps years before, one I found much easier than she did.

At 30 years old, I rarely let a single day pass without some kind of physical activity; yet, there I was, defeated before the sun set on the first day of this hike. While shivering in my sleeping bag, I concluded that this was more than hubris. I had tempted fate when an obvious precedent had been set.

Hindsight
I was not one to talk about signs, but it suddenly seemed far more pragmatic to duck and cover in the aftermath of a terrible ten months, not light out for the Andes.

The downward spiral had begun when left a good job, home, and friends in New York. I longed for my home state of California, but the beautiful state came at high a price, namely unemployment and unstable housing, but that was not the worst of it. Not even close.

Every member of my maternal and paternal family had physically suffered some kind of ailment since September. Some were comparably mild, but all seemed to point to failures of the body. My mother endured mysterious ailments, and doctors blamed her lack of muscle tone. My older brother’s ever expanding waistline vexed me to no end, so in a desperate, if not downright callous move, I bought him a Fitbit for his birthday. Upon receiving the wireless-enabled wearable device offering data on the number of steps walked and calories burned, he responded a short text: “message received.” Our father’s obesity, ever-present among his other deficiencies, was a frightening reality.

And there were the deaths. In the wake of my parent’s divorce and many subsequent separations from others, our paternal grandparents morphed into quasi-parents for me and my brother, dominating our childhood lives. Last September, my grandfather was given six months to live after expensive, private treatments failed to cure his lung cancer. He died three weeks later. Somewhere between the final hospital stay and the funeral, my grandmother asked me to be her health agent, bypassing my father, and by February I was spending half the week in Los Angeles, caring for her as she rapidly succumbed to bone marrow cancer. Two weeks later, my husband’s grandfather—a man who called me at least four times a week—passed away after a dozen hospital stays for various bodily malfunctions.

I had always been active as an adult, but—after this series of events—I became hell-bent at cultivating a sustainable, healthy body. I was ready to contend with whatever came my way, which was probably the main reason I found myself violently shaking in a tent on the Inca trail in the first place.

When night fell, I gratefully accepted a clear liquid that my fellow mountaineer Edwin poured into my cupped hands. Before he left for a trek, his mother took to the jungle in search of medicinal flowers. She made this concoction every time, he assured me, because at least two of ten in his group always needed it—a statistic that made my heart sink.

“I’m embarrassed,” I whispered to him, inhaling the potent brew. My face no longer burned, but it was still red in the aftermath of the applause I received from my fellow trekkers, celebrating my ability to walk ten steps to the dining tent. I did feel slightly better, but I could not eat or be merry. “I thought this wouldn’t be so challenging, physically…”

“You cannot prepare your body for this altitude, which is thousands of feet above what you are used to,” Edwin responded, a legitimate, if not axiomatic explanation, and yet it did very little for me. In truth, I wanted to be physically prepared for life so that I could triumph over whatever it dealt me. I was tired of my loved ones suffering in their bodies. I was tired of suffering.

“Go to sleep,” Edwin ordered, telling me I would feel better in the morning. He handed my husband the clear potion in a miniscule vessel, and then turned his attention back to me, placing a light hand on my shoulder.

“Tomorrow, move slowly. Remember to look around.”

And so I did. When a porter awoke us at 5 a.m. with coca tea, I found myself almost fully restored. I was only mildly surprised to see the boys take pills to ward off altitude sickness; unbeknownst to me, they had been taking them all along. I politely declined their offer to share, unwrapping a coca leaf candy. As they quickly disappeared into the horizon, I zigzagged as Edwin instructed, up and down the stones laid by his ancestors.

Maintaining a downright leisurely pace placed me in the middle of my pack, and somewhere past the ruins of Runkuracay, overwhelmed by the flora and fauna and my fascinating travelmates, I completely forgot about my body and its many limitations. There was just too much to experience, and it was so fleeting. When I improbably encountered a stout, thick Peruvian woman selling chichi to porters, an infamous saliva-fermented beer I had turned my nose up at days earlier, I found myself happily accepting a swig. There was plenty of time to meander about the ancient fortresses of Sayamarca, to lie on verdant ground and count terraces. I witnessed my new Lebanese friend’s one successful attempt to converse with a llama atop the Winay Wayna ruins. When I waited for two London-based artists to rearrange their packs, a small boy appeared out of nowhere on the narrow descent. He giggled and pointed at us as his shoeless feet carried him passed us. There were waterfalls, orchids, birds, and mercurial skies. I saw it all.

At 3:30 a.m. on the final day, Javier hurried us up the path, headlamps and all, towards Intipunktu, the Sun Gate. We secured a plateau overlooking the 15th-century Inca site, perched above the Urubamba Valley. The sun’s rays slowly shooed away the darkness, but it still felt sudden, with the drama usually reserved for sleek movies on the big screens, when the entirety of Machu Picchu shone before us. I had, of course, seen pictures of the ancient site, but the reality of the lost city perched on a green-carpeted ridge was nothing short of magical, as was my presence there.

All around me, people took turns being quiet and contemplative, occasionally breaking the silence with reactions that ranged from eloquent musings about life to indecipherable mutterings that sounded an awful lot like “wow.” They were all right; they were there, and so was I.
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Read more by Alexis Coe online or follow her on Twitter: @alexis_coe

Category: Hiking & Backpacking