Shedding beliefs in the Atacama Desert
I’m walking under the sun’s merciless glare, which becomes blinding as it reflects off the Salar de Atacama in Chile, one of the world’s largest and most desolate deserts. Despite the bandages I’ve wrapped them in, my feet manage to produce new blisters even as the old ones open again. Every muscle in my body seems to be hurting, claiming for me to stop and lie down. And yet I will not.
The day before yesterday, on an icy morning 4100 meters (13,500 feet) above sea level, I took part in a ritual offering to the Pachamama, in which I and my fellow adventurers, through an Inca shaman or Yatiri, asked for and received her and the ancestors’ permission to pass through her lands. The ancestors, the Yatiri explained, never ventured across the salt flats; yet they have given us, the foreigners with the strange speech and newfangled clothes, their blessing to attempt the feat.
But this auspicious beginning has not prepared me for what comes next, for the sheer inhumanity and viciousness of what I’ve bargained for — a 250-kilometer (155-mile) self-sustained trek through the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth and perhaps the loneliest, where temperatures soar to suffocating heights during the day and drop below freezing level at night. On that first day, we cover 32 kilometers (20 miles) along an old mountain footpath used by the Incas since olden times. We fight apunamiento, or altitude sickness, which brings with it headache and nausea.
On the second day, my damaged feet are supposed to carry me a further 47 kilometers (30 miles) along a riverbed, and somehow they do; the first blisters appear, courtesy of soaked feet and endless hours of trudging.
On the third day, we cover 34 kilometers (21 miles) of sand and rocks. Then comes the fourth day, on which the flatlands await us — the first 42 kilometers (26 miles) of them. We start at dawn.
The surface of the salt flats is white and irregular, like a freshly ploughed snowfield. No one, we are once again told, has ever attempted to cross it on foot. Not an encouraging message. Perhaps there was a reason for this — the ancestors were wise. Every now and then our feet break through the thin layer of salt and sink into a puddle. Salt water and blisters are not exactly the best of friends. I want to scream from the pain. Tomorrow I will have to face the toughest leg of the event: 80 kilometers (50 miles) of rugged salt terrain, across the remaining stretch of the Salar and the neighboring Valley of Death.
Why am I doing this, you might ask — why am I punishing myself, as it would seem, in this way? An easy answer would be: “I am running away from myself, from the paradigms I have built around myself and built myself around — from the Wall Street financier persona that is smothering me, that is no longer who or what I want to be. I am running away from the man in the pinstripe suit, power tie and bull-and-bear suspenders who still believes in eternal growth — the man with the steely eyes, whose creed is profit and whose middle name is extraction. I want to put the world between that man and this one, between myself and I”. That would be the easy answer, and perhaps it’s true. But it’s only a partial answer, one that leaves out my quest — because, if you cease to be something, then you must surely become something else, right?
Later, when attempting to answer this fairly frequent question, I will often resort to snake imagery. Many times over the course of its life, a snake will find a deep dark place to burrow into and shed its skin. It will go into the darkness to remove its own darkness — a skin that’s become flaky, dry, no longer serviceable. A quick Google search will offer a reason for this: the snake has continued to grow, even if its skin has not. And, just as important, this: shedding the old skin enables the snake to shed harmful parasites. I have continued to grow, even if my paradigm, and the structures it created, have remained unchanged over the years. I have changed inside my skin. And that skin –my paradigm– has turned on me, begun to prey on me.
Am I like a snake then? Am I breaking out of my old constructs, which have become as fetters refraining me from reaching what I strive for? Am I a new person inside an ancient skin? Have I chosen, instead of a darkling place, the blinding Atacama, its barren flats, to slough this old skin and let my new one see the light? Is this the way you shed the layers of untruth you are trapped under — through pain, hunger, heat or cold, exhaustion?
At some point, dogged by constant torment, overexertion and hunger, I hit on a method for keeping myself on my feet and moving: I try to detach myself from my body’s suffering. I imagine that I am carrying a cask of memories and that I take these memories out, one at a time, and examine them. I pick a memory out of the cask and try to focus on it, looking at it from every angle. I conjure up visual images to better recall what happened, days or years ago. Who was there? What were they wearing? What was said and by whom? Weather, colors, movement. Someone’s hand moving over a table. Music in the background. A garden. I try hard to focus — if my concentration slips, the excruciating pain in my feet takes frontstage again, making me feel as if I were walking on hot coals, and my drained body remember that it is on the point of collapsing.
I am doing this in search of a new way of being in the world. A new connection and sense of purpose. I suddenly realize that this is what it’s been about, all along — a cleansing, a purification through hardship and toil, a way of divesting myself of all I am in order to transcend into a purer dimension, one of surrender and perfect tapping into the whole. There is no place for ego in this equation — only absolute surrender, and connection to the All.
The cask eventually becomes empty. There is nothing more to extract or call up. The inside of the cask has become polished from all my scraping and fingering. Like a dying man who sees his whole life pass before his eyes in his last moments, I have summoned up and reviewed all my relationships, dreams and experiences to keep my mind off the biting pain. And then, as it becomes more and more clear that I can no longer stave off the living hell of my bodily suffering –exhaustion, dehydration, thirst, the ache, the sticky sores on my feet–, the unthinkable happens, and all of that is sloughed off.
That night, at the makeshift camp me and my friends have hastily put up, not having made it to the assigned checkpoint, my smile will be wide enough to behead me if I’m not careful. Bivouacking with my dead-tired friends under the shimmering canopy of the Milky Way, as our water bottles freeze yet again and the unrelenting cold tightens its stranglehold, I will be filled with a profound joy that I will not even attempt to put into words. But I am trying now.
What comes as I trudge on, thirsty, drained, bone-tired, my feet two huge blisters sticking to their socks, is a sudden detachment. Like an ancient mystic, I have somehow released myself from my worn-out body and, as a result, achieved total concentration, an absolute, never-before-experienced mental clarity. My old skin sloughed off. The essence of myself in complete communion with the whole — painless, keen, merged, seamlessly part of the glaring whiteness of the desert becoming one with the flinty sky.
Two days later, a week since the beginning of this adventure, a man bearing my name and face completes the 155-mile trek with his two teammates amidst cheers and celebration. But who is he? This man’s cognomen and physical resemblance to a certain Wall Street financier –the one who seven days ago watched an Inca ceremony with more curiosity than awareness– are all that binds the two of them now. The dapper money man, with his expensive suit and hard handshake, fades into the bright desert light. The skin has been sloughed off and the cask is again full — of what promises and projects, of what insights, is another story.
