Impeccable Timing
I asked my daughter Elisa what time meant to her.
She’s just five years old, so I wondered how she approaches time, having spent so little of it alive. She said time is minutes, because for a kid, time is immediate and the future is abstract art. As parents, we are always saying “wait a minute” or “just a minute,” and “I’ll be there in a few minutes”. She frequently asks us how many minutes until the next stop, how many minutes until we get to Chile, and how many minutes until her birthday. By now, she’s heard of weeks, months, and years, but her expertise is in minutes. Unable to conceive three months, or a year, she could not begin to contemplate the phrase ’50 years ago’, let alone, 500 years, or 1,500 years.
We are living in a campervan for the next ten months, I told her. How many minutes is 10 months, she asked. I learned to deconstruct time and created the five-year old friendly Peppa-Pig increment, which is roughly 10–15 minutes, or the time it takes to watch an episode. If we are going to wait an hour, I tell her it will be four Peppa-Pig episodes. When she asked for how many Peppa-Pigs we will be living in the campervan, I told her she shouldn’t watch so much TV, and that there is a long list of places still to be visited.
Right before crossing the Peruvian border, we watched the animated film Pachamama on Netflix, a story set in the Andes mountains, depicting life in a village of the Incan Empire right before the Spanish ships arrive. I told her that the Spanish arrived over 500 years ago, and then after a few hundred years, the nation of Peru was created. That was a lot of minutes ago, I remind her. I know she can’t grasp how long ago that was, perhaps none of us can, given the time’s relativity to culture, homo sapiens, life, and the earth itself. But if you ever want to give your children a lesson in time, Peru is a good place.
A few days later, we were peering into the past at Tumbas Reales, a museum located in Lambayeque. The museum is mostly dedicated to one man’s royal tomb, which when uncovered in 1987, revealed the remains of a soldier with no feet (thought to be the guard of the tomb), 6 other humans (3 concubines, 2 military advisors, and child), and a massive royal menagerie of gold, jewelry, adornments, art, clothing, pottery and remnants of food. There was also a dog and 2 llamas.
The museum, which finally opened in 2002, displays the painstaking work of recreating the so-called Señor de Sipan, who was buried among more than 600 objects. In the dust, they found gold and copper-plated coverings for much of the body, including the eyes, teeth, nose, ears, chest, and feet. They found and restored a large gold and silver chain in the form of 20 unshelled peanuts; 3 sets of ear plates, each artfully designed with turquoise and gold scenes of animal semi-gods. They found the man’s royal scepter, several crowns, and chest covering with the head of a man and the body of an octopus, and several layers of beaded decorative clothing, each one meticulously re-sewn and original.
All of this is on display, blowing minds. For Elisa he was really old, but why didn’t the Spanish loot this guy’s royal bounty, she asked, like in the movie Pachamama? The answer: time.
The Señor de Sipán is one of several tombs discovered in the last 30 years, and the first of its kind found without the hallmarks of tomb raiders or guaqueros, who for centuries removed the gold and disrupted the chance for scientific minds to study ancient cultures. The Moches (100–700 a.d.) built massive temples of adobe that over time have reverted to inconspicuous piles of mud, beat down by rain and wind for over one thousand years. Driving through northern Peru, you see hundreds of such piles of dirt, and you wonder, could that be a temple? How many more tombs are in there? Probably hundreds, maybe thousands. Who has the time to excavate them?
Other stories covered in sand have also emerged in this part of Peru. Just last year, archeologists found a sacrificial site with 140 skeletons of children between 8 and 12 years old outside the ancient adobe-city of Chan Chan. The sacrifice, which took place in the hands of the Chimú culture after the year 1400, is thought to appease the gods responsible for El niño flooding, and is the largest ceremonial sacrifice of children the world has ever known.
It makes me wonder what are the meta-stories we are leaving behind and how will we be perceived? If today we scoff at the Moche and Chimu traditions of human sacrifice, what will the next species say about our tradition of generating so much useless garbage, stacked in piles everywhere?
My daughters like to pick up plastic, especially on the beach, where a plastic bottle is like a treasure in the sand for a two year old. These days, beaches without plastic and garbage are hard to find. I’ve come to accept that my daughters were born into a plasticized world that my culture created. As a result, the idea that plastic and garbage devalues or damages the aesthetic of our planet is still foreign to them, but it doesn’t have to be. Refuse, Reduce, Recycle. Out on walks, we tend to pick up trash. Ignacia says because you lead by example and not words. Then one morning Elisa told us she wanted to be a trash collector when she’s older.
Can Elisa make a difference? Plastic trash is fast piling up, and collectors can’t collect it all. All along the Panamerican Highway there are absurd mountains of trash on either side, these, our society’s colorful temples of shame. However, underneath there is no royalty, no mummies, and definitely no gold. When the next species inherits the earth, and begin to uncover our civilization, they might discover cities and roads, but the story won’t be how we were buried, rather why we let ourselves be buried in plastic.
