What Holds Us Together, series 3, no. 5. Graphite, pastel and cotton floss on paper. 2020
I get this sick feeling when I look at the spot on the map where I was robbed. All this guilt, shame and loss washes over and through me. Before it happened I had built this ramp from pieces of wood I found from a stack of trash lying near the garage entrance to the hospedajae I had booked for the night. (This, after riding 43 kilometers of dirt and another 112 of gorgeously ribboned pavement, as I descended from the southern side of Huascarán Mountain - the tallest peak in Péru, and the fourth highest in the western hemisphere – to land in the hiker tourist town of Huaraz.) The curb was too tall for my bike to hop, so I had to improvise, which I did, and I was bloody proud of myself.
Then I realized there was no weight on my back. My pack was gone, though I still don’t remember ever taking it off. I was that tired. In a split second I lost everything I needed to create, communicate and move freely, legally and/or logistically, in the country. Laptop, iPhone, passport, paper maps, original motorcycle title, driver license, moto permit, sketchbook, cash.. everything except my backup drive, credit cards, my SLR camera and the other gear I carried on the bike itself.
With the help of the clerk at the hospedajae, I contacted the police. Since they’d gotten my phone, I could track it on the lobby computer; it was somewhere in a neighborhood a couple kilometers away. The cops tried hard to find it, but the GPS data wasn’t precise enough. So I spent most of that night in the police station, filing a report, figuring I could at least use it later in an insurance claim. Shit.
Two days have passed, and I don’t feel so bad anymore. I miss the lost pictures of the mountains and the set of switchbacks that kicked my ass. I miss the iPhone camera that could handle any situation and turn it into something magical, without effort. I miss all the gorgeous stamps in my passport from the countries I’ve ridden through. And the slick, clean feel of that sweet little Macintosh. Oh, and going $400 deeper into dept for a crappy GPS (worth about a third of that in the US) is now my only hope for getting through the rest of these mountains without reading the stars, tea leaves, or the indecipherable lines on my hands for guidance.
My eyes no longer hurt. I’m not wasting hours upon hours staring at my phone, waiting for some kind of meaning to issue forth from its glass, plastic and rare-earth metal encasing. Nope. Instead, I’m writing in a notebook for pre-teens with a fitness ad on the inside cover. I communicate solely using computers I find at hostels or internet cafes. I have no forms of ID other than this police report and a letter with my fingerprint and signature. I am alone in a remote part of a country nearly 10,000 miles away from my own. If I’m stopped by police I’ll have to explain in my barely existent Spanish that I was robbed, and that my replacement permit to ride a motorcycle in this country is, um.. “in process”…