Close Encounter With The Third World

Writing about Peru has proven to be something akin to Proust’s Madeleine For me: I’ve been sucked into a vortex of memories of that childhood sea voyage.

The ship’s first port of call was Buenaventura, Columbia. We rushed to the deck to see—because during this entire trip my parents relentlessly channeled Eloise’s duenna (h/t Nanda!) “ if we were just going to lie around in our rooms, we might as well have stayed at home!”
Emerging topside into the hot sunshine, my first impression was the smell: shit. And not the mildly nose-wrinkling excremental odor I had encountered occasionally in an outhouse in my native clime: of old, cold poop mingled with the woody smell of an outhouse’s timbers. Nuh-uh: this was fresh, warm, all-pervasive. Take a deep, or even shallow, breath, and you could not choose but taste it.
And my first visual memory of the port is of a boy, a teenager, gaily strutting on the pier. He had on three pairs of pants, and—all three were worn through. The pants, all three layers, were the color of dirt, a snotty green-brown, and through the ragged portal his glossy buttock gleamed out like a chestnut.
Tearing my gaze away from the lad, I saw various items littering the pier. Big metal drums , oil cans, I reckon, were everywhere. And people appeared to be living in them!

I don’t remember what I said, but I’m pretty confident that the gist of it was “Ewwww!”
“A third of the world’s population DOES live this way, you know,” scoffed my big brother, eight years my senior, a college student and no man’s fool.

No, I didn’t know that. I was a child! But I knew it in my heart and soul from that moment on. Kinda a “Dover Beach” moment:

“…for this world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…”

But lemme close with some comic relief, in case this has put the Simonettes off their breakfast. We disembarked, with my sister ( five days less than a year my junior) and me wearing new matching outfits: pedal-pusher length pants in bright pink, yellow and orange stripes. Oh, and: carrying white umbrellas to protect our fair northern hides from the equatorial sun. The sartorially-compromised lad and his, uh, gang ( I was gonna say “peeps”, but I don’t wanna dwell on his unwitting buttock flash) followed us through the mephitic streets pointing and laughing, as jubilant as though the circus had come to town!
(I don’t tell you this to make fun of my mom, who was responsible for the pedal-pushers ‘n’ parasols: she had no idea what to expect either, and to my recollection; this first port was the only time my sister and I were ever so accoutered, as I recall.)

Traveling on a cargo cum passenger ship (look up:the history of the Grace Line, if you’re interested)afforded other memorable sights. I remember watching a huge block of granite, about half the size of a car, being hoisted from the dock. At the apogee of its journey, the grapplers failed! I reflexively clapped my hands to my ears, anticipating a deafening crash. It plummeted. It hit. And…it bounced! Not granite after all, but rubber.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for kindly accompanying me on my memory cruise!