Ode to Charlie

Sometimes people are brought together under the most unusual of circumstance. Charlie came into and left my life like a curtain rising and falling. I haven't seen Charlie now for 25 years, but now and then I think of him, and of what we went through together.

A little background music: This was in the Vietnam era, which made scholars of us all… I had finished my undergraduate degree and was starting a Master's degree in Latin American Studies. Charlie was working on his Ph.D. in history. An opportunity to receive a graduate fellowship at Catholic University in Pôrto Alegre, Brasil came up. Up to five students from the University of New Mexico would be granted up to a year's study there. It sounded like a great opportunity for adventure. I could wait out the winding down of the war; Charlie could find a subject for his dissertation. We both jumped at the opportunity.

The first big question was how we were going to get ourselves down there. The two of us decided to take a tour of South America before arriving at our destination in the southernmost province of Brasil. Little did we know what we had in store for ourselves!

Margaret was the third person to join our adventure. We did not know at the time that she was pregnant and would soon be starting to suffer from morning sickness! She was short and perky, though, so we could see some advantages of having her along with us…

Charlie was 6 feet 4 inches tall, and weighed well over 250 pounds. He spoke in a hushed, lispy voice. He was as quick mentally as he was slow physically. I was 6 feet 1 inch tall, and well over 200 pounds myself. Margaret might have reached 5 feet on a good day.

Finally the route was planned. We would fly to Quito, then go by land as far as we could go across the continent, from northwest to southeast. From Quito it would be on to Lima, then Cusco and Macchu Picchu. Eventually we would end up in La Paz, Bolivia. From there we would take the train or a plane to São Paulo, Brasil. Finally it would be a longish bus ride to Pôrto Alegre. We booked plenty of time for this journey.

On the way into Quito Charlie, who kept stating that we were going to die, over and over again, awakened me. I could see that we were corkscrewing our way into the valley, but was too groggy to be absolutely certain that we were goners. Charlie was. Suddenly we climbed out of the valley and eventually landed in Guayaquil, Ecuador. This is where the hemispheric reversal of weather hit us the hardest. Guayaquil was just beastly hot.

The crew informed us that we had gone on to Guayaquil because there was a crashed plane at the end of the runway in Quito, and we had gone on to wait for them to clear the wreckage. We should wait in the terminal. This sounded good at that point, since we were completely melting by this point, having come down in the middle of winter from Albuquerque. We assumed the terminal would be air-conditioned. Wrong.

After about two hours in the terminal it was announced that we were supposed to go to the plane we had landed in and claim our luggage. Our plane had died while sitting on the runway, and we would have to lug our bags to another plane, not more than ¼ mile away in over 100 degree heat. This is when we discovered that Charlie's bags were lost.

By this time Charlie's fear of flying had begun to spread among the rest of us. There were just too many things going wrong. We were glad to have a "normal" (sic) landing at the Quito airport.

After some inquiries we found out the location of Charlie's bags. It would take a mere 4 days to get them delivered from Caracas! We toured the city. A priest showed us the crypt underneath San Francisco church, where many local martyrs were buried. Ecuador's most infamous dictator, Garcia Moreno, had the crypt built. He was down there along with quite a few people he had sent ahead of him into the afterlife.

The University of New Mexico had a junior year abroad campus in Quito. When we visited there, the student mood was melancholy. Now that Charlie had officially established himself as our Greek Chorus, we needed none of that! We struck out on our own after a couple of days, which mostly consisted of trying to find some chicken for our next meal.

Charlie towered over the natives. The kids took to following him around and slapping him on the butt, shouting "Gordo! Gordo!"(fat). Charlie, in his best lispy Portuguese, would tell them to go away. This just encouraged them all the more. At 9,000 feet, short of breath, we both made pretty easy targets for such taunting.

We checked the bus schedules to Lima. 56-hour trip. 23 buses to choose from, all leaving within 2 ½ hours of each other, same day of the week. The first bus would leave about 3 days after Charlie's bags would show up. He was getting pretty ripe after a few days, so Margaret and I were praying for some efficiency we hadn't seen up to that point in our trip.

The trip to Lima was memorable for a couple of reasons, outside of its duration. I have never seen so many banana trees. I will never forget how, after snaking our way up a mountainside for nearly eight hours, for an instant the bus seemed to level off. We looked around, and everyone in the bus had beads out and they were crossing themselves. At that moment we started plunging down the other side of the mountains.

We stayed overnight in Trujillo, Peru after about 32 hours of winding up and down those mountainsides. After finding the best hotel in town, we discovered there was no hot water. The practical approach was to drink 4 or 5 beers, and then take a shower, which we did. We soon afterwards fell asleep. Much to our surprise the next morning the sidewalks had developed a lot of cracks, and some were even offset a few inches vertically. With our fatigue and beers we had managed to sleep through an earthquake!

Lima itself was a real disappointment. There was one nice section of town, Miraflores, and some nice colonial buildings. Other than that everything else seemed pretty grubby and nothing seemed to work very well. We decided not to tarry, to get to Cusco as soon as possible.

Now we were into a combination bus-train scenario. At Ayacucho we switched to a train. While waiting at the station, some of the locals wandered by and practiced their spitting marksmanship on our shoes. Not to worry, things were about to get worse.

We climbed into the Andes, up and up. At some point we were over 16,000 feet. The train was jumping up and down like a pogo stick. We were gasping for air. It was probably a good thing there was no food on the train because none of us could hold anything down for more than a few seconds anyway. Luckily it was only a 14-hour train ride....

Cusco was beautiful. It had some beautiful Incan exhibits, good food, a great view, and llamas walking through the town. We decided to stay there a few days.

We took the first-class train to Macchu Picchu, which let us out at the foot of the ruins, roughly 1500 feet above us. We grabbed the first bus up to the ruins that we could find. This is where we almost lost Margaret. We were in the back of the bus, figuring our odds of survival were higher there. If you think about it, this is a very good indication of what altitude sickness can do to people...

Suddenly the back door of the bus came open on a particularly steep section of road, and Margaret started sliding toward the door. We grabbed her and held on tight until we finally arrived at the ruins. We also thought about how really smart we were should the brakes on the bus fail and as a result the vehicle would start sliding back down the hill. We could watch the whole thing from the back of the bus.

The ruins were just as beautiful as imagined. The view from the mountain is spectacular. There was a stairway that leads up to a second level of Macchu Picchu, maybe another 600 feet up. We were not feeling all that lucky at this point and declined to make that trip!

From Cusco it was on to La Paz by bus. At the border between Peru and Bolivia we were told that a Bolivian bus would complete the trip in to La Paz. We waited a few hours for it to show up. Margaret, who was feeling pretty bad by now, aroused herself from her stupor and started screaming "La Paz! La Paz!" when she heard a bus in the distance. Charlie showed his finest foot speed of the trip and we were on our way.

The washboard road around Lake Titicaca was unbelievable. What little stamina we had left was bounced out of us on our way into La Paz. At one point I tried a few coca leaves. Just popped them into my mouth and chewed them. Not exactly the prescribed routine, but it helped a bit.

La Paz was a really crazy town. One of the more spectacular sights for the locals was watching Charlie and me jump into flowerbeds whenever a Mercedes Benz would try to run us down! I think it was about the second or third dive that Charlie made into the bushes when he uttered his definitive statement: "You know, I've been studying these people for several years now, and I hate them!"

They did have pretty decent hamburgers there. At that altitude one beer was about half a drink too much. The dreams at night were bizarre, for all of us. Soroche (altitude sickness) dreams.

We learned that the train across the jungle headed to São Paulo was having some problems. That was enough for us to hear. Some problems, in local lingo, might mean it would NEVER get there. We bought plane tickets to the big city.

Yet another interesting experience was our flight on Lloyd's Aéreo Boliviano. The airport is about 1500 feet above the city. As we were slowly gathering momentum over the runway, Charlie shouted, "Look at that!" Scrolling past us now were signs that said 50, 40, 30, 20, 10. Sure enough, at the end we ran out of runway. We dropped a few hundred feet, which allowed the plane to pick up enough speed to begin to climb out of the valley. We began to wonder if we shouldn't have waited for the train tracks to get repaired.

At the Sao Paulo airport, the busiest in South America, Charlie switched from his traditional Portuguese in Spanish-speaking lands, to Spanish. Darned near fluent! Up to this point it hadn't mattered much, since in the Andes not too many people spoke Spanish anyway.

After a couple of days in big, bustling, polluted Sao Paulo we were ready for our last bus ride to Pôrto Alegre, a mere 600 or so miles south, on luxury buses with fold-down seats and free juice from the cooler. In addition, about every 4 to 6 hours the bus would stop at a station, where good Italian food was available. We were beginning to feel we were back in civilization.

Having arrived in Pôrto Alegre, we reported to Catholic University, where the staff administrator greeted us. He explained the terms of the fellowship, registration, our stipends, or meal tickets, etc. We were to go to the local Rotary meeting the next day to see if anyone had a place for us to stay.

The Rotarians were quite taken by Margaret. As for Charlie and me, well, the response was not overwhelming. Somehow a connection was made for the two less comely ones to stay with Jim and Suzanne Converse. Jim was doing some post-doctoral research out of the University of Wisconsin- Madison on the integration patterns in southern Brasil of the Italian and German colonists.

After a quick consultation, Jim came up with an offer we couldn't refuse. We could stay in the garage for a minimal fee, and would pay for Sunday dinners at the local churascarria (steak house). Best offer we had!

We quickly settled into a routine. One night a week Charlie and I would head up the hill to the local cantina and discuss the world in general with the near-permanent inhabitants of the bar. They really got a kick out of Charlie's Spanish, and after a few beers or glasses of wine nobody cared much one way or another that he was stuck in the wrong language!

Every day Charlie would report to the library at the University and do some more "original research" on the obscure explorer he had chosen for his dissertation. I attended some classes and hung out with the students. Black beans and rice with farofa nearly every day.

One by one we drifted back to the states. My fate led me into the Army. Charlie, with whom I had suffered the most hellacious journey of my life, I never saw again. Years later, returning from a stay in Portugal, my wife and I ran into Jim and Suzanne at Cornell. They told me that Charlie had gone back to Cincinnati to help his sister raise her child.

I don't know if Charlie ever used all his years and years of study to teach the youth of America about Latin American history, but I'm pretty sure his advice to them on writing a dissertation would be: "Stay up here! There are lots of nice comfortable research facilities here in our own country! And the natives are friendly!"