Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  The reason we know these things about Hiram Bingham is that he carefully preserved his correspondence and clipped any news items in which his name appeared, to be saved in an annotated scrapbook. (He’d learned the habit from his mother.) His father, by toiling for decades in obscurity with little to show for it except a Bible that almost no one could read, had taught Hiram III a valuable lesson in the importance of self-promotion. If a man was going to work that hard, the world ought to know about it.

  FOUR

  How I Met Your Madre

  New York City

  Future scholars of the Adams family are unlikely to unearth much evidence of ambition or adventurous spirit. Any early interest in the outdoors that I might have developed was F squelched in the second grade when I was banned from the Cub Scouts due to a late birthday. Seventeen years later, I was splitting my time unenthusiastically between two vocations unlikely to result in a sunburn—tending bar in the Chicago Loop and halfheartedly pursuing a PhD in English literature uptown. One night, my roommate’s notoriously pushy girlfriend came into the bar, ordered me to buy her a drink and announced that she’d met an editor from Outside magazine that morning and had all but badgered him into offering me an internship, sight unseen. I reported for work a few months later and felt as if I’d landed in a foreign country. I’d had absolutely no idea that so many people were so interested in things like mountain climbing, hiking, and camping.

  After six months of apprenticeship, I left to seek my fortune in New York City, a place where I knew no one. I rented a room out of the Village Voice classifieds, in the home of an eccentric lawyer who owned a converted firehouse in Brooklyn. Most mornings I awakened to find her morbidly obese house cat sitting on my face. The odd living arrangements came with one excellent fringe benefit: proximity to the lawyer’s beautiful niece. Aurita wore cowboy boots and smelled like jasmine and wanted to be a veterinarian. She happened to be Peruvian. She also happened to have a boyfriend. But she was willing to sit for hours and listen to a lonely young would-be writer pour out his guts as he was—unbeknownst to either of them—falling in love. When I moved on to a cat-free apartment, we traded a couple of answering-machine messages and fell out of touch.

  My best friend from high school had moved to Bolivia to work on nature documentaries and invited me down to visit. Unless you count a brief pass through the Canadian side of Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist, I had never been outside of the continental United States. Within hours of landing in La Paz, we were standing in the aisle of a decommissioned school bus with a seating capacity of thirty-two (the little plaque, in English, was still bolted above the driver’s head), loaded with at least fifty people and an unknowable number of animals, careening through the Andes down a steep, twisting road that I later learned is a perennial contender for the title of World’s Most Dangerous Highway.

  For a jet-lagged boy raised in the pancake-flat Midwest, the experience of stepping off that bus and staring up two miles at a twenty-one-thousand-foot peak was akin to seeing the face of God. Intrigued by tales that Aurita had told me of even greater wonders along the Inca Trail, my friend and I tried to enter Peru via the Lake Titicaca ferry but were rebuffed by a menacing teenage soldier carrying an AK-47 and wearing a Barbie backpack. I looked across the water toward Peru and vowed to return one day. Then an old man with a cane picked my pocket.

  E. B. White once wrote that a person should only come to New York if he’s prepared to be lucky, and as they would for Hiram Bingham in Peru in 1911, the stars aligned for me in my first couple of years in the Big Apple. I found a job with medical benefits and a light-filled apartment two blocks from Central Park. Right before my second Christmas in the city, out of the eight million people I might have collided with on the sidewalk, I bumped into Aurita, who was now single. We went for coffee and never really separated. By the following Christmas, she was my wife.

  It has been said that anyone who takes a Latin American spouse is essentially marrying the entire extended familia. In my case this brought me into the orbit of Nati Huamani. Nati had started out as Aurita’s nanny and now managed her parents’ sprawling beehive of a home in Washington, D.C., as a sort of full-time personal assistant-cook-majordomo. Aurita’s family was from Lima, the cosmopolitan capital on Peru’s Pacific coast. Lima is a lot like Los Angeles: valet parking, beaches, smog alerts. Nati was from the Andes, which aren’t even remotely like any other place on earth. She had grown up speaking Quechua, the language of the Incas. Occasionally, loosened up by a pisco sour, Nati would tell me stories about the mysticism and superstitions of the Quechua people in her tiny mountain hometown.

  Life in the Andes hadn’t changed much since the Spanish Conquest almost five hundred years ago. People still plowed their fields by hand with sticks and observed centuries-old rituals to pay their respects to the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. Older folks kept time by monitoring the shadow cast across a local volcanic peak, which was revered as an apu, or mountain deity. Evil spirits were obstacles to be dealt with on a daily basis, much as I might have to contend with trying to catch a taxi on a rainy day. When you had a problem, you could say a prayer at the Catholic church and then talk to the village chaman, a healer who knew how to broker deals with the apus.

  Nati was a great believer in the power of omens and dreams, which often foretold future events. She was perplexed by one image that visited her sleep for weeks.

  “I keep dreaming that Aurita has a fruit tree growing in her stomach,” she told us.

  It was right around then that we found out, quite unexpectedly, that Aurita was going to have a baby.

  FIVE

  Itinerant Scholar

  Berkeley > Cambridge > Princeton

  A photograph taken of Bingham at Yale showed the six feet four, sandy-haired explorer-to-be standing a full head taller than his classmates, looking like a somber, skinny power forward from a Soviet basketball team. He likely had a lot on his mind. After graduating in the spring of 1898, Hiram III returned to Honolulu to join the family business, as superintendent of a mission devoted to aiding the down-and-out. But Bingham’s years at Yale had taught him to question his father’s fundamentalist faith, and he lasted only six months before tendering his resignation. He later explained that he had left “because I found it impossible to teach the very orthodox beliefs which those in charge of the Mission expected to be taught.”

  Something else may have been crowding Hiram III’s thoughts during those first months back in Honolulu. The previous summer, on a trip to the Yale-Harvard yacht races near New London, Connecticut, he had met a shy, sheltered young woman named Alfreda Mitchell. Her mother, Annie Tiffany Mitchell, was an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune. Annie’s husband, Alfred, was an entrepreneur; his peripatetic career prior to settling down comfortably as a man of wealth had included stints operating whaling ships, serving in the Union Army and prospecting for gold in California.

  Alfred Mitchell had fond memories of his seafaring days in Hawaii, and around the time Hiram Bingham III began doubting his future as a missionary, the four Mitchells were entering Honolulu Harbor aboard their yacht Archer. Two days after their arrival, Bingham paid the first of many social calls at their winter cottage on Waikiki Beach. Considering that Mitchell’s father-in-law, Charles Tiffany, had thought Mitchell wasn’t good enough for his daughter, Bingham might have expected a little more sympathy. Instead, Mitchell packed his daughters off to Japan.

  Bingham took the hint, bought a ticket to San Francisco and enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He would pursue a master’s in history. Annie Tiffany Mitchell cabled encouragement to the new scholar in California: “When you get your M.A., you can have your A. M.”

  Hiram II, on the other hand, was flabbergasted by his son’s secular turn. Hiram III did not help matters by explaining that his love for Alfreda was the light by which he now navigated his life. The elder Bingham, convinced that his son was aboard an express train to hell, reminded hi
m that “the greatest force in a man’s life should be supreme love to Jesus, supreme loyalty to the Saviour of the world.... If it is not, I have everything to fear for you.”

  Demonstrating the drive that would later serve him well in his explorations, Bingham fulfilled the requirements for his graduate degree in a single academic year, all while giving a series of lectures on Hawaii and managing to cut something of a figure on the social circuit. The San Francisco Chronicle noted his attendance at a private dinner dance, entertaining “a merry group of this season’s debutantes.” He was, perhaps, a young man in too great a hurry; one grandson noted later that in writing his thesis, Bingham had “copied a number of long passages without the use of quotation marks.” By the fall of 1900, Bingham was in Cambridge pursuing a PhD in history at Harvard. He and Alfreda were married at the Mitchell home in New London on November 20, in a ceremony presided over by Yale’s former president.

  At Harvard, Bingham had chosen to specialize in a new, but potentially important, field of study—South American history. For his PhD dissertation topic, Bingham wrote about the Scots Darien Colony. This ill-fated settlement had been an attempt by Scottish explorers at the end of the seventeenth century to establish a trading beachhead in what is now Panama. Unfortunately, they chose an especially inhospitable spot of jungle, known today as the Darién Gap, which still remains among the least developed areas in the Western Hemisphere. Bingham received his doctorate (and a $10,000 gift from the Mitchells) in 1905. His greatest hope was for a Yale appointment,” one son remembered. Bingham repeatedly called on the university’s president, Arthur Twining Hadley, to see if there was anything he could do for him. There wasn’t. Harvard showed no interest in offering him a teaching position, either.

  Unexpectedly, Bingham received an inquiry from Woodrow Wilson—yes, that Woodrow Wilson—who was then building his reputation as a brainy, liberal university president at Princeton. Would Bingham consider a position as a “preceptor”—one of Wilson’s energetic young faculty leading innovative small discussion groups—teaching history and politics? After seeking permission from his in-laws, who had purchased and furnished a Cambridge mansion for the newlyweds, Bingham accepted the three-year assignment.

  Princeton was not a good fit. Bingham struggled to stay on top of his course load. He squabbled with Wilson over special treatment that the president wanted for the son of a wealthy alum. An attack of appendicitis provided Bingham with an excuse to request a year’s leave of absence, supposedly to convalesce. Having recently turned thirty, he was more concerned with thinking about his future. As it turned out, both he and Wilson were contemplating major life changes. Wilson was considering a move into politics; Bingham was looking for adventure. Seven years later, under very different circumstances, they would be two of the most famous men in America.

  SIX

  The Call of the Wild

  New York City

  Some humans are born great and others achieve greatness, but contrary to what Tony Robbins might tell you, most of us are perfectly content to have slightly-above-averageness thrust upon us. After rushing through my first couple of years in New York on a frantic sprint from extra-innings adolescence to sobering adult responsibility, I spent the next decade on a leisurely slide toward middle age. Aurita became a veterinarian. Alex was joined by two little brothers, Lucas and Magnus. We bought a house in the suburbs, a gas grill, a Volvo wagon. Aurita and the boys and I traveled to Peru almost yearly, but these trips were like my coworkers’ weekend visits to Connecticut to see their in-laws. Between the lunches and dinners and cocktail parties at which we saw various cousins and uncles and aunts and close family friends who weren’t blood relatives—as far as I could tell—but were called uncles and aunts, we rarely left the city limits of Lima.

  My passport probably held some sort of U.S. record for most entry stamps to Peru without managing to visit Machu Picchu.

  Any hopes I had of returning to explore the 99.9 percent of South America that exists outside of Lima were sublimated into my work, assigning stories to writers and photographers who got to fly off to the ends of the earth. On paper, I was an adventure expert. My actual boots-on-the-ground experience was somewhat limited. I had never hunted or fished, didn’t own a mountain bike and couldn’t start a fire without matches if ordered to do so at gunpoint. Back when the Barbie backpack kid had waved his AK at me at Lake Titicaca, it had taken me a few seconds to understand that I even was at gunpoint.

  And then, as it tends to do, life started sending gentle overdue notices. Turning forty is supposed to be the milestone that kindles a man’s urge to buy a Maserati and chase sorority girls. It was the approach of forty-one that got to me. An e-mail from an old boss arrived: a former coworker my age, who had the physique of a ten-thousand-meter champion, had collapsed on the subway when his heart stopped. His life was saved only through a million-to-one coincidence: An off-duty paramedic had been called in to work unexpectedly that day when a plane crash-landed after takeoff, was riding home in a car that happened to be delayed across the platform, stepped off her train to investigate why a crowd had gathered around my unconscious friend, and happened to know that they were in one of the few stations in the five boroughs that had a defibrillator.

  A few weeks later my wife’s Peruvian cousin, who’d just sent us pictures of his adorable newborn daughter, dropped dead of a coronary in Lima, six days after his forty-first birthday.

  On my fortieth birthday, it occurred to me that I was now the same age that my mother had been when she found a tumor in her mouth, the first sign of the cancer that took her life before she got around to doing all the things she’d planned to do once her five children finally left the house.

  It was around this time that Hiram Bingham’s name turned up in the news and Machu Picchu started appearing in my dreams. This in itself wasn’t surprising, since I often dream about my work—nightmares about forgotten margarita orders haunted my sleep for years after I hung up my bar rag. I spent my days working in the offices of Adventure magazine, a publication that specialized in ambitious trips to far-off places and coverage of extreme expeditions to the earth’s remaining frontiers. In other words, the sort of job where someone could spend hours on the Internet indulging his new Machu Picchu obsession without attracting a lot of attention. The dreams continued for weeks and were strangely repetitive; in each one, I’d step onto an escalator in the subway or in a department store and step off onto Machu Picchu’s empty, mist-shrouded central plaza. We kept meeting in the strangest places, Machu Picchu and I, like the leads in a romantic comedy.

  As piles of Bingham-related material accumulated on my computer’s desktop, I noticed that one crucial piece of information seemed to be missing. No one could say with confidence exactly why this extraordinary complex of stone buildings had been constructed in the first place. Was it a fortress? A sun temple? A really elaborate granary? A spiritual portal to the fourth dimension, constructed by extraterrestrial stonemasons? All of these ideas had been floated, but only one person seemed to have definitive answers: Bingham. After making three expeditions to the mountaintop citadel, the explorer was certain that he’d found the legendary Vilcabamba, famous as the Lost City of the Incas, which he described in his best-known book as the “magnificently built sanctuary” to which the surviving Incas escaped when their empire was invaded by Francisco Pizarro and his small army of ruthless Spaniards in 1532. “Here they were shut off from that part of Peru which was under the sway of Pizarro and the conquistadors by mighty precipices, passes three miles high, granite canyons more than a mile in depth, glaciers and tropical jungles, as well as by dangerous rapids.”

  If there was one thing modern Machu Picchu experts definitely did agree on, however, it was that Bingham’s theories about the site were ridiculous. The latest hypothesis, which seemed to have been generally accepted, had been conceived by two Yale scholars who’d spent years going over the artifacts that Bingham had excavated. Their conclusion was that Machu Picchu h
ad been something slightly less romantic than the Lost City that Bingham imagined. Rather, it had been the country estate of an Inca emperor.

  I thought: That’s it? The lost summer home of the Incas? There had to be more to the story.

  One morning, while procrastinating at my desk on the nineteenth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, I closed the door to my office and took from my bag a copy of Bingham’s Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia. The book was Bingham’s chronicle of his first great adventure, a 1906–07 trip to South America. (When the librarian handed it to me, she said, “Looks like this one’s been on the shelf for a while.” The last due date had been stamped in 1914.) Like me, Bingham had been bored with his work. He was toying with the idea of writing a biography of the great South American liberator, Simón Bolívar, while on leave from his dead-end Princeton teaching job. The published sources were woefully inadequate to answer his questions. “I came to the conclusion that if I wished to understand this period in the history of South America,” Bingham wrote, library resources would be insufficient. To truly get inside his subject’s head and understand his actions, he would have to leave his desk and undertake “an exploration of the route of his most celebrated campaign.”

  I picked up the phone and called Aurita at her veterinary office.

  “Is this important?” she asked. The background noise sounded like a gang war had broken out between cats and dogs. “I’m on the other line with a collie that ate a Ziploc bag. Er, the owner of a collie. You know what I mean.”