The leaf is not the line

On the first day up the Inca Trail you ask Vincente if America campaigns

contra coca in his country. The people won’t abide it, he says:

la hoja de coca no es droga, no plague on Toronto’s toilet-top choppers.

So much coca is needed, Vincente says, and so many chemicals to

make just a little cocaine, there’s no comparing the leaf and the line.

More like manzanilla: a balm against the beating migraine of mountain

sickness; a subtle appetite suppressant and laxative; a protein-rich pick-me-up.

It’s the perfect trail mix, you joke, as you buy a bag from a quiet trailside vendor

(blithely overpaying, but when will you come to Peru again).

And a natural dentifrice, your newlywed adds with politesse, to go

by all the campesinos’ bright smiles. In the villages you pass they pose

for photos; the walls of small shops bear big billboards for American colas,

while distant hillsides bear patches scorched bare to form words, which

Vincente translates: candidates’ slogans for the upcoming election.

The coca leaf gleams dark army green above, its pattern of veins like

the back of your hand, and beneath, it’s the gentle yellow of open avocado.

The leaf in the mouth first feels tough as card, then softens like lamb’s ear.

How thinly live those who never try anything once.

(On your last night in Lima you eat a roasted guinea pig.)

Coca tastes of dusty jasmine tea lightly honeyed, or freshly mown lawn

laced lightly with iodine. Its scent suggests knowledge

as old as the Cordillera Blanca, as ancient as the snake.

You chew it continually up the Trail’s endless ascent,

Vincente noting those stretches of Trail rebuilt after quakes for us tourists,

across the four-thousand-foot-high saddle of Dead Woman’s Pass,

across the cloud canopy cusp of the Amazon headwaters,

the Quechua guides racing past you and your drumming headache

with khaki duffels on their backs and only sandals on their bare bleeding feet.

On your second day at Sayaqmarka, Vincente tells you archaeologists

unearthed a girl sacrificed and mummified, in her

stomach a last meal of enough coca to numb her nerves, but not enough

to get anywhere as high as the DEA crop dusters that fly so unlike condors

over Bogotá’s backyards and the plazas of La Paz, indiscriminately bathing

ambassadors and schoolchildren alike in cloying herbicidal rain.

Absent America’s paltry, toxic ideas, stuck like chewed gum in the deep pockets

of the so-called war on drugs (which means two things),

you might have brought your bag home; you later learn some of your fellow

travelers did, undeclaring. But you leave it with Vincente.

How anyone can acclimatize to Peruvian altitudes you’ll never know.

The night before you reach Machu Picchu, the Irish guy in your group,

Martin, sings “Old Man River” like he was Paul Robeson,

his improbable bass voice circling the campfire like a puma.