On Sunday I woke up early, probably the only person at PSF to wake without a hangover. Breakfast consisted of me unhappily eating an entire papaya. The fruit and seeds of papaya are a natural antidote for intestinal parasites, unfortunately the taste is somewhere between bland and acidic. After that, and very thoroughly brushing my teeth, I joined a few others for a walk to the beach. Last weekend's trip to Huacachina, where I unwisely skimped on the sunscreen while in the middle of the burning desert, has led to me spending my spare minutes peeling skin off my shoulders, and to me being very fastidious with my sunblock habits. So this time I was adequately lathered.
I spent most of the time either talking with Evan and Lindsay or reading Hemingway. An unfortunate side effect of my intestinal ailment and use of antibiotics is that my stomach is not up to handling much alcohol. I notice this most while reading. Hemingway should be taken with wine or strong drink, although coffee will also do. While reading, reclining on my towel, I had an unsettling shuddering feeling, like my body was trembling, only it wasn't, the shudder was in the ground. I looked at the others and they nodded: it was a tremor. My first. Their a pretty common occurrence here, and I might not have noticed this one if I hadn't been lying down. I wasn't scared, I was out on the beach in the open, nothing was going to fall on me. But it was unsettling; I felt, very literally, not sure of my footing. It's a strange feeling when you can't completely trust the ground you're standing on.
Dinner last night was a barbecue, bring your own meat. I had steak, and many people here seem to be unfamiliar with the cooking technique of pouring beer over your meat as it cooks.
Today I felt better, but still not up for heavy physical work, so I opted to go on an offered tour, led by Joe, the other, more established Joe. My newly acquired nickname, through a series of misunderstandings, is 'Jop.' I can live with it. Everyone who went on the tour has been here at least as long as I have, but, like me, felt they had only a partial view of the city. This was a tour to acquaint us with what happened to Pisco; how the Pisco of noon on August 15, 2007, compares with the city we now live in.
The quake, I now know, hit at around 6pm. It measured between 7.9 and 8.0 on the Richter scale and lasted three minutes. By comparison, the San Francisco quake in 1989 lasted fifteen seconds. Four years ago, shortly before the big quake hit, their was a noticeable tremor. The people, as they usually did, went outside and waited a few minutes to make sure it was safe, then went back inside. When the ground started shaking late, many dismissed it as an aftershock. Hundreds of people in on of the main cathedrals attending a memorial service of a well-known public figure where killed when the roof, which had stood for over a hundred years, fell on top of them. The only survivor was the priest, who was in one of the rear alcoves at the time. Hundreds of people, seeking safety in a wide-open area where nothing could fall on them, ran to the beach, and most did not read anything ominous into the fact that the sea level had retreated drastically. Shortly afterwards, a tsunami generated by the earthquake slammed into the shore, killing over a hundred and pushing a wall of water nearly a quarter mile inland. Eighty percent of the city was leveled. Among those killed were the family of the mayor, and in the immediate aftermath he, in a state of combined shock and denial, was unable to govern effectively, but refused to step down.
We walked along the shore, passing a lagoon PSF helped to clean up. Many rare migratory birds use the lagoons on the shore of Pisco as a stop on their migrations, which was unfortunate when, for years after the earthquake, the municipal government decided to dump hundreds of tons of dirt, debris, and garbage on the beach. It was cheaper to dump in there than take it inland. We passed the foundation of a four or five star hotel which stood on the beach for most of the twentieth century. We passed derelict remains of beautiful colonial architecture. One of these old buildings that survived is now a hostel, still in development, but the front is a sort of museum, the walls covered with photograph of the city before it fell.
The city in the pictures is unrecognizable to me. Block after block of buildings older than most you would find in the U.S. It looks like the sort of place Hemingway would have been at home, rich in history and architecture, with plenty of cafes and bars. Pisco, I learned, is where Pizarro and his men landed when they came searching for a fabled city of gold. It was Peru's first port, and for a long time, it's biggest. This is a very old city, but most of the buildings in it are younger than I am. I'm reminded of Kurosawa's movie Stray Dog. It was made in, and takes place in, Tokyo in 1949, four years after the firebombing destroyed over 50% of the city. I remember that a critic said that "Tokyo in this film is like an open wound, festering in the sun." I haven't thought of Pisco, like that, I didn't have much context, I didn't have the city of five years ago to compare it to. Looking out the window of the tuk-tuk on the way back to PSF, Pisco, for the first time, looked like a disaster area still in recovery, like a shattered ruin still trying to put itself back together.
This is a strange place. Many people live in one story rectangles of concrete and wood panels, as many live in tents on yards of dirt. Cab ride across town costs the equivalent of 63 cents. Rats and dogs occupy the same niche. The women who work here can't walk down the street without being cat-called. Parts of the beach are lined with mountains of debris. Sometimes the ground shakes under your feet. This is a city in recovery, and tonight as I sit here writing this I appreciate that as I haven't before. It seems like every day here brings some new insight into this city, into what happened here and what is happening here. As I think I said before, gaining this kind of insight is not always comfortable, but it is always worth having.
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