My first solo backpacking trip: Peru, an introduction. pt 1

It seems like I've always been traveling. In a car. Mom's house. Dad's house. Grandma one, Grandma two, Grandma three. El Paso, Juarez, Las Cruces, Chaparral, Clint. One dusty road at a time. Mostly it was because of dad's work, and partly because I hated taking naps and there weren't many babysitters in El Paso willing to put up with a kid who wouldn't sleep. Dad's a welder. I loved going to work with my dad; especially when the customers (mostly the elderly with a soft spot for a chubby kid) brought out coke and gummy worms for me to eat while I helped my dad work.

About a year ago my dad told me that he knew the reason I had left El Paso. He talked about it the way children talk about their parent's when they die of cancer, as if they could have done something about it. Pried those cigarettes out of their hands. "I always wondered what would have happened if I would have let you go explore that mountain?" My dad said to me. He traced it all back to a time a when I was seven-years-old. He said we were out driving near the Franklin Mountains on our way to a job site when I turned and asked him, "What's behind the mountain?" More mountains, was my dad's response. I marveled at the answer. Parent's words are magic. I remembered thinking to myself. It's true they're endless! Seven-year-olds don't understand sarcasm. My dad said that the answer didn't seem to make me happy and before my dad could turn onto the interstate he said I asked him to pullover. He did.

He told me that I pointed out an area at the base of a hill covered in yucca plants with a few orange boulders that poked out over the cacti. Then, according to dad, I turned to him and said, "Just leave me here.You go to work. I'll go up there and explore the mountain. When you're done, come and get me. Then I'll tell you all about it." He said I was trying to bribe him with the last part, and as you can imagine my dad did what any other sane parent would do. He continued driving. But after I left El Paso to move abroad that scenario must have lingered in my dad's head.

He could be right. Maybe going up there would have purged that longing to explore from my system. Maybe I would have walked out into the desert and realized that the world was a frightening place, where the wilderness howls as wind or wolf, and there are no stores, or soft places to sleep at night. Maybe I would have realized that I was small and alone. Maybe that day I would have seen that the world could suck you up and forget about you until someone else walked by and found my corpse. You get the picture.

Cuzco, Peru

Instead, I grew obsessed with backpacking, camping, and hiking.  I started reading National Geographic, and journals about the Oregon Trail. I imagined myself in those times walking endlessly towards a place I wasn't sure existed, through landscapes I could only imagine. I wanted adventure.

That day, with my dad, I looked over to the side of the road and saw more than a low, wide peak. That day I realized that the world ended just on the other side of the Franklins because the world was the Franklins.

The thing about backpacking is that you never actually become proficient unless you do it.  In order to improve at anything you've gotta make mistakes and hope that they don't kill you in the process. I'm not an expert. I'm an amateur backpacker who hasn't made any mistakes big enough to kill him, yet. This is the first post about my first failure.Which didn't involve much camping or hiking, but I carried a backpack around Peru and eventually got to my destination.