5           writing time as weather

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Chapter 5 recounts trips with Tina to the farm of her close friend Chara, where together they grow coca alongside legal crops on the Huallaga River’s left bank. In writing these journeys I foreground my interactions with her ever-distant friend, all the while describing postwar transformations of rural terrains. In wakes of turbulent pasts, reading the countryside requires marking absences revealed by those who lived there before. For men, like Chara, drinking rituals are a place where those pasts insist to make heads spin again. Stories propel them to drink; getting drunk, they tell their stories. Of a bum foot and how it got that way, of a blind cantina owner serenading patrons with his guitar, of courage summoned to retrieve bodies of murdered kin. Between a river’s natural history and mutations of political time, the past never ceases to return—here in stories animating what vanished from sight.