Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.
-first sentence of Cien años de soledad
In 1973 it took me 3 days aboard a cargo truck on a dirt-quickly turning to-mud track to cross over the Andes and drop down the ceja de la selva past Quince Mil all the way to Puerto Maldonado on the banks of the Madre de Dios- called the Ruthless River by an adventuresome gringa who a year before I arrived floated a flimsy raft downstream from there and almost died. Nothing I did or even imagined doing was as dramatic as that.
I had read Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest about shooting the Pongo de Mainique on the fast-dropping Urubamba River, which runs north from Cuzco, not east. That was what got me to the Peruvian Amazon in the first place, but the Madre de Dios is tame, lazy, wide, and slow compared to the Urubamba- more my style.
Today on the map Puerto Maldonado looks like a city. Back then it was barely a town, more like a village. I remember buying warm bread in the town of Urcos as we started out from Cuzco, and was glad it was warm because I was so cold up at that elevation. Down in the jungle I dripped and panted, shed clothes and dried my face to no avail. It was too damn hot.
I remember sitting alone in the treeless Plaza de Armas on a concrete bench waiting for the next cargo truck to fill up with nuts and hardwood to reverse course up the Andes. I planned to be on it. Meanwhile I had a few days to kill on the plaza. No one else was out. No shade, high noon, too hot. As Ella said, But when the thermometer goes 'way up. And the weather is sizzling hot. It’s too darn hot.
Just me and the popsicle boy, maybe 7 years old, slowly making his square paseo at the plaza’s outer edge. When he got to my bench I waved him over and bought a chupete out of his styrofoam box. I don’t remember what flavor, it would not have mattered even if it had been my least favorite. I don’t have strong opinions about popsicle flavors anyway.
I ate it, he walked his round back to me, and I bought another, he solemnly making correct change. Our transaction was all above board. I ate another, he made another lap, I called him over again, and so on and so forth until I had bought and eaten all his chupetes. There must have been twenty five in the box, and he was as solemn and dignified making correct change for his last as he had been for his first.
I don’t think I could have survived my time in Puerto Maldonado without sucking that ice, sin chupar ese hielo.
But about that gringa. Just a year back I read her book, which tells how her raft got caught in a back water oxbow lake, and she and her husband could not push it out to the current, and they almost died, and finally were rescued by turtle hunters and taken to Riberalta, Bolivia where they were nursed off death’s door by an American Maryknoll nun.
I asked Sister Joan, a Maryknoll nun I knew who had been in Peru at the same time. She knew the nun stationed in Riberalta and remembered hearing the story. Crazy gringos, she said. And unlucky because they had no ice to suck.