Silent Drams In Ocucaje
11 Mar
It’s been a long time since my last post. This is largely due to epic quantities of work here at PSF and many ‘extra curricular ‘ activities at the weekends as well. Activities like trips to the Ocucaje desert.
The Ocucaje Desert in all its silent splendor.
The Ocucaje Desert is infamous as a fossil hunting ground for everyone from homely geologists to determined smugglers. It is essentially a forty five million year old fossilized sea floor. Parts of the desert are so startling in their oceanic qualities, with endless beds of wind worn shells and partially exposed whale skeletons, that just being there spaces you out too far to fully grasp what you are looking at.
One of many ancient whale skeletons that the desert coughs up every few years after erosion and sand reallocation.
Our guide was a man of spectacular and commendable madness named Roberto Penny Cabrera. A native Peruvian, although a direct descendent of the conquistadors apparently, he spoke technically excellent English of which only 30% was understandable due to his own brand of passion infused, sanity starved ranting. During the four hour drive into the desert from Ica we gathered that Paleontologists and Archaeologists were the enemy, but that Geologists were acceptable. We also learned that he had forgotten it was his birthday the next day, his main interest was in brains and asteroids and that he knew of a spot on a woman that when touched would make her “…open like a flower!”
Roberto in all his glory. My friend Rupert having a bit of wander in the background.
We saw many things in the desert, we saw things so thick and fast that the one day we spent there felt like time expanded across a whole week. Whole days of experience concentrated into one pure and endless scattering of hours. We saw the fossil beds, the whale skeleton with crystallized brain tissue, a gorge cast in waves of corrugated rock walls by moulds of air over countless millennia. We saw human remains scattered across an ancient burial ground that belonged to the Paracas People, the exposed bones and fabric discarded like strewn fragments of brilliant white china, brittle, forgotten and unknown. The hands of what might have been children were draped across the desert floor, some still with mummified skin and fingernails attached. In short, we agreed it was one of the best weekends of our lives.
One of the many bones lying idle in the Ocucaje.
But of all the endless wonders we were exposed to in the desert there was one thing that struck me more than any other. It was in the darkness the night we arrived, after we pitched the tent and sat down underneath one of the most star drenched skies we ever saw, it was the silence. Not just the quiet you get in a deserted forest, not even the kind of quiet you get in the remotest parts of Scotland or another country. Here there was nothing, not a single lick of breeze, no distant breath of aircraft in the skies, no occasional flicker from a far off highway, no creatures, no life, only the fossilized sound of extinction all around us. The silence was deafening, heavy and thick. A transparent weight across the night through which you looked at magnified stars. Every patch of sky threw up a dusty splatter of milky way that you had never seen before, each new corner revealed quiet shooting stars and the infinite fizz of the universe. All filtered through the greatest absence of noise you could ever hope to hear. The only piece of music that springs to mind is this one, perhaps it would be one of the only places on earth you could truly ‘hear’ this music.
For all that this piece of music has been mocked in its time, its purpose is not really directly musical. Here at PSF there is a communal courtyard that is filled with people working during the day and at night with people relaxing, socialising, drinking and eating. The volunteers change as people come and go, the jobs change the work changes and the only constants are the tick tock of day and night, the heat of the sun and the endless carnage of music that is played from our speakers all the time. I am driven often to distraction with the kinds of music played here so endlessly, music that is not my taste at all that is rendered even more aurally poisonous when re-mixed with the whine of circular saws in the yard and the bleating traffic outside the house. One man’s music is another man’s noise and like the piece by Mr John Cage above, the desert reminded me that sometimes a true and deep love of music is reliant upon its occasional absence, sometimes silence is the missing part of life’s score. The desert was the most silent place I’ve ever been, it made our slow return to civilization a noisy one. Now I hear the cars outside my window and the shrieks of the nighttime in Pisco with a greater sensitivity than I thought possible, now the cacophony is a symphony of pain. But I wouldn’t change the experience of the desert, no matter how loud things get.
I thought quite hard about what whisky I might have chosen for this experience if I could have taken one with me. In retrospect it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. Knowing me I would have opted for something obscenely delicious, expensive and silly. The problem is that swimming in pure, liquid silence under a field of stars is something of a humbling experience, if you’re going to drink anything with it it should really be as unassuming and quietly beautiful as possible. That’s where the old official Longmorn 15 comes in. Leaving aside the olfactory beauty of these old Longmorns for a moment, it is worth remembering that for a long time this was an under-appreciated bottling, especially in its glory years of the late 80s and early 90s. So to drink one now is something of a quietly special experience, a moment when you can reflect on what a great and simply delicious drink whisky can be and so often is when it works. When all the bullshit is stripped away and you are left with only a simply put together yet beautifully crafted spirit. These old Longmorns are among the best bottlings, in my opinion, at reflecting this. It is whisky at its most honest and humbling, uncomplicated, delicious and satisfying. Not something to be precious about but something to respect, share and love. I would have loved to have had a bottle of this that night in the desert, to have shared it with Rupert, Stephen and Walter, the friends I travelled there with. I miss whisky, but at least I know there is plenty of it awaiting me upon my return home, I might never go back to that desert and to have shared it then with such great people is an experience that probably not even whisky could have improved. The silence was intoxicating enough.
ps: That spot was the big toe (apparently).
