The Samaipata Effect

Totora, Bolivia used to be a nice, quaint colonial village. It is tucked in a high valley, up in the dry mountains, and if you plunge directly downhill you can arrive in the lush, humid tropical lowlands in a day or so. It's down in those lowlands that crops can be grown (fruits, veggies, and coca for chewing) but the bugs are bad down there and it rains all the time. So in the late 1800's the big landowning terratenientes built their wrought-iron balcony/ stone patio townhouses in Totora, and it was there that they sipped Cappuccino and read the Times.

But seasons have turned cien veces, and a hundred presidents have fled to Spain with the Bolivian Treasury in a suitcase, and the Times are no longer printed in Totora. In fact, few people there are interested in reading. It's dusty, the roads are often impassibly eroded, and there is barbed-wire fencing in the Plaza. Even for Ben Beall IV, the consummate optimist, Totora is "tough."

If you strike out on the well-worn cobblestone highway heading eastward out of Totora, you contour around treeless peaks, then drop into orange river valleys, past mud brick houses and goats. There are potatoes growing over there. That river obviously floods really big sometimes. Where is that person possibly walking to?

And then you cross an incredible expanse of cactus-country. It looks like Grandma moved to a retirement community in Arizona and went TOTALLY overboard with the Southwestern decor. There are dozens of varieties of cactuses, and dry arroyos, and layers of reds and tans and oranges. And after another day of driving, you smell water, palpable in your sinuses, and of a sudden you crest a hill and base-jump into a cloud forest with booming trees, spreading ferns, draped in bromeliads and orchids. Waterfalls stream down Yosemite-like cliffs. Here, the Inca had a spa carved into the granite. There you can see bespectacled bears and resplendent quetzales.

There, in Samaipata, something happens to your heart. It lifts; it opens. There is a sense that you have just begun to breathe, just hoped for the first time. That now, if you sleep, you will dream of endless possibilities.

The Samaipata Effect is something that has stayed with me ever since that day. It's quite simple, and perhaps boringly obvious: we have a very real relationship with the environment in which we live. A beautiful place can inspire us, lift us up, make us strive for more. And similarly, we can feel stifled or oppressed by our context. It can bind your feet, limiting your dreams. Someone might find Echo Park absolutely inspiring. Someone else might feel that lift in Midtown of Manhattan, or at the Louvre, or maybe at Vasey's Paradise, or looking out into the waves rolling into Ho'okipa.

The relationship is real, and it's effect on us is real. I live on a futon in Bushsick, Brooklyn, across the street from the Boarshead Meat packing facility. I'm inspired to paint the room black.