Letter from Peru

leaving to come home

Fi in the Amazon

It’s been a year. Our first year without Bailey lands on June 4th. My 60th birthday fell just ahead of Mother’s Day, and each of those milestones proved challenging, testing a tenuous equilibrium that defined this past year and allowed us to function, if barely at times. As June crept closer, the long, long shadows returned. This is, of course, how grief works — you think you’re on stable footing, you think you are somewhat capable, and then you are back on a highwire, seized once more by that singular vertigo that all mourners share. There is nothing to be done but proceed, or to paraphrase Robert Frost, there is no way out but through.

Somehow, my wise husband knew we were approaching another set of rapids and planned a series of trips for the month of May. He rightly assumed that anonymity, wonder, novelty, and movement would help me—and us—find our way again, help us face the constant “how did this happen,” “how could this happen,” “I cannot believe this happened” and “I cannot fathom that she is gone” echoing in our hearts and souls. A year ago tomorrow, Bailey graduated from high school. Three days later, she was dead. So, yes, we needed to distract ourselves from graduation season, which is a big deal in the landscape of any small town. Travel was our escape hatch. Most important of all, we wanted and needed to see Fiona and get a glimpse of her first foray as a young field biologist. This meant heading to Peru.

From left…Fiona with her colleagues, the Madre de Dios at sunset and a spider monkey

We spent the past two weeks traveling to extremes — our first stop was well off the tourist radar. We started in the lowlands of the Peruvian Amazon near the Bolivian border at the Los Amigos Biological Station, where Fiona concluded a months-long internship recording mercury contamination from illegal gold mining in palm-sized Lancifer beetles. Before arriving in the lowlands, she assisted researchers studying the Andean bear at Wayquecha Biological Station at 9,000 feet in the magical cloud forest adjacent to Manu National Park.

It takes a 3.5-hour boat ride to get to Los Amigos from Labarinto, a sketchy and booming gold mining town. Aggressive illegal mining is not a new problem — for decades, the late great Sebastião Salgado kept his lens on Brazilian mines to record the mining industry’s toll on the human spirit. As we chugged up the Madre de Dios river, we saw the breathtaking scale of deforestation and river pollution in one of the most fragile, most biodiverse places on earth, along with countless generators and mining rafts perched on the river banks, and it became obvious the exent to which our global lust for gold has dire consequences. The worst of this assault on the vast rainforest was out of sight behind the jungle canopy. The mercury used to extract gold flows into this wide, turgid tributary of the Amazon, and it rises as smoke when burned off, depositing neurotoxins in surrounding ecosystems in now poisonous rainfall. Pregnant mothers, children, the miners themselves and all wildlife are suffering in ways not yet entirely measured or understood. It was a relief to cross into the Los Amigos Preserve, slightly larger than Canyonlands National Park, where the canopy stands tall and lush and is constantly surveilled for miners. But they cannot keep the poison out from the Madre de Dios river and the rain and the air. The mercury is everywhere.

Los Amigos is a critical preserve in the Amazon. New species are still being discovered, and known inhabitants are still being understood. Shortly before our arrival and after a particularly sodden few days, Fiona hung her anorak outside her dorm room to dry. The following morning, she picked it up, wondering why it seemed a fraction heavier. Then she looked inside and saw several pairs of eyes looking back at her. A wandering spider the size of a teacup saucer had thoughtfully nested in her raincoat. It’s not a casual house spider — it’s extremely venomous and has a delightful habit of executing a warning dance on its hind four legs before launching at its perceived threat. At least it dances before going on the offensive, so there’s that. An entomologist colleague of Fiona’s caught the spider with a bucket, then released it further afield. Needless to say, my husband and I remained on the lookout for a spider that could do the Macarena and whose venom can cause a particularly painful priapism in men.

We saw no wandering spiders, though I’m sure they saw us. There were other adventures. I managed to drop my iPhone from a canoe into a piranha-infested oxbow lake, which harbored God knows what else, and so there it remains. Fiona tried to extract it with a fishing net, but the phone had already been swallowed by feet of mud, and now I am another polluter of the Amazon. That said, there are great benefits to having a screen-free vacation, though less dramatic ways of doing so. Dancing spiders, extreme heat, and devouring mud aside, this research station is a marvel, filled with primates, macaws, honeycreepers, pumas, jaguars, giant anteaters, giant armadillos, orchids, skyscraper trees, a breathtaking array of plants, and cane toads the size of baseball mits. This station is a tribute to scientists working towards a better planet. Many scientists have been there for years, and there is a warm, welcoming community. Meals are communal, and everyone was patient with my conversational Spanish, which was halting at best. There were scientists from Mexico, Italy, Colombia, and Peru, along with a few intrepid tourists from the Netherlands and Wales, looking for a cheap and unique venue to stay.

Next, we went to another extreme in altitude, well on the beaten track of most tourists—the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. Before I settled down (a phrase that never made sense, because having children is unsettling), I was a globetrotter and good at it. Now decades of homebodiness have caught up with me, and I fuss over packing the right shoes, raingear, and toiletries like some sort of high-maintenance dowager in an Anthony Trollope novel, going on a world tour complete with steamer trunks. We also lag behind our nimble and vigorous daughter and her near-fluent Spanish, who is as intrepid as they come. Another exercise in humility. We toured the storied ruins of Chinchero, Maras, Moray, and Pisac, then finished at Machu Picchu.

Six years earlier, our daughter Bailey had been to Machu Picchu on a 7th-grade school trip, so this added another dimension to our ascent. Navigating the crowds at Machu Picchu took dexterity and tenacity but as we climbed, the rain blew in and crowds thinned, leaving us space to wonder where Bailey had wandered, to marvel at Incan ingenuity, with sophisticated irrigation and row after row of agricultural terraces, and how a civilization remained concealed from conquistadors and scavengers under the rainforest canopy for centuries until Hiram Bingham followed a rumor and a hunch. It was worth the rigor and then some.

We finished our trip in ancient-modern Cusco among unkempt backpackers, expats, tourists sampling guinea pig cuisine and ayahuasca hallucinations, and hundreds of healthy-looking free-range dogs trotting with singular purpose towards mysterious destinations or snoozing away on a sidewalk inches from utter traffic chaos as pedestrians moved around or over them. We lingered over breakfast, ate like royalty, and decompressed for two days before coming home.

I arrived home with a bit more ballast and a small tailwind to get me through the anniversary. My father never understood why people mark the day when a beloved departs this earthly plane — he felt that honoring the birthday was much more important. Fiona and Daniel are more in his camp, but I need to honor both the beginning and the end since noting the brackets of our narrative makes sense to me. Some believe in the afterlife, others think memories take shape as spirits, and there are those who insist that the end is the end. I know that Bai is everywhere all at once. And next Wednesday, we will climb back into the hills here to picnic and reminisce in one of Bailey’s favorite local places, well out of cell range but always in range of Bailey.