Thump. Click. Hiss. Then, it was my turn to make noises, as the back tire deflated on my Motobecane Jubile road bike and I uttered a string of sentences that could never be printed in this family paper.
It was 8:10 a.m. I was on the 7th Avenue Parkway at Josephine in Denver, 20 minutes before I had to be at a desk at 19th and Sherman. Many things should have been racing through my head, but all I could think about was Peru.
Peru often comes up in many conversations I have with strangers, especially when I get that quintessentially American question: “What do you ‘do’?”
I used to respond: “Well, I just finished working with an order of Catholic priests in the Peruvian city of Tacna. For 2.5 years, I agreed not to come home, embraced celibacy, and stayed in a place bordering the driest desert on Earth.”
With this bit of provocation, I hoped to engage people in a conversation about religion, about poverty, about America’s place in the world.
Unfortunately, instead of riveting discussion, I often got the frustratingly anodyne response, “Huh, Peru, how was that?”
I used to say that asking this question to someone who has just returned from extensive time abroad is like asking a couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary: How’s your marriage?
With any response, no matter how complete, I felt I was cheapening the experience, as I applied staid declarative sentences to something I saw as so romantically formative.
Disheartened by this question, I began to reduce my real feelings about Peru to clichés like “You have time to think down there” or “It’s really fast-paced up here.”
The bitterness I felt in giving such hackneyed responses began to infect my perceptions of both America and Peru.
Peru became the land of the inveterately curious and the wisely introspective; America was for hopelessly boring materialists, for those whose inquiries would never move beyond the prosaic.
And so I created these unhealthy dichotomies, these unbelievable caricatures of both places.
With hardly three months back at home, I concluded that fellow Denverites, blinded by their parochialism, could never comprehend the spiritual highs I had attained while abroad.
Then, a funny thing happened on 7th Avenue: I was stuck with a flat and no spare bike tube.
All I could do was esperar, to wait and hope, exactly as I had done on many a day in Tacna, when the bus ran out of gas or someone who said they would show up at 4:00 p.m. was still not around at 5:30 p.m. It must be more than coincidental that those two verbs are the same word in Spanish.
8:30 a.m. arrived and I was still on 7th Avenue, desperate and already late to work, when a fellow biker stopped and asked if I wanted his spare tube.
Incredulously, I said “yes” and started to use my tire levers to replace the punctured tube from my back wheel.
Unfortunately, in my haste to get back on the road, I snapped two tire levers and lost my only means of easing the tire over the wheel.
Stuck again, I continued to esperar, until a second biker came along, offering me use of his levers and helping me finish the repair. This was a scene I had experienced so many times in Peru: people sharing what they had in time and materiel, with no expectation of anything in return.
At 9:05 a.m., as I raced through Cheesman Park, en route to the 16th Avenue bike path, I realized that we are more than the sum of the words we use in our first question with a stranger. Only when I was forced to esperar in the United States, to lose control and become dependant on others, did I understand how foolhardy it was to romanticize my experience in Peru, at the expense of living similarly formative moments in Denver.
There is a dangerous belief, proffered by us 20-somethings, that you need to be evangelized by the poorest of the poor to feel true solidarity or that you need to dig deep latrines in distant lands to achieve nirvana.
This view was rightly shattered for me on the 7th Avenue Parkway, as the serendipitous events of the morning forced me to come to grips with a seemingly self-evident truth: charity and gratitude and moments of transcendence respect no boundaries, least among them the national.
Dermot Lynch lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
