Between the Lines

Breaking Trail
By Larry Burke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

Forty years ago, in the jungled mountains of Eastern Peru, a man named Benigno Aazco acted on a wild and fanciful ambition. He gathered his wife and three children and vanished into what was then, and is still, a virtual no-man's-land, absent from both maps and the consciousness of less visionary adventurers. Hacking his way over paths last traveled by Inca warriors, Aazco stopped only long enough to build a house or plant a crop before abandoning both to travel ever deeper into the jungle. His dream: to civilize this dark territory, bringing to it families, homes, farms, churches, communities. In short, Aazco hoped to rebuild the Inca Empire.

Somewhere along the way, however, things went very wrong. No citizenry followed Aazco's lead, and soon bizarre rumors of less-than-civilized behavior snaked their way out of the forest--stories of murder and sexual deviation and familial disputes. Kurtzlike, Aazco remained, four decades gone into the jungle, ruling not a nation but only an Aazco family tribe. In "Peruvian Gothic," a troubling, searching narrative, novelist and journalist Kate Wheeler takes us to the "devastating mountains" of eastern Peru in a quest for the perhaps apocryphal Aazco. Wheeler, who grew up in South America and whom Granta recently named one of the top 20 young American novelists, pushed her way into the jungle, finding landscape and, ultimately, a flesh-and-bone man. She returned with a sobering family saga that is as transcendent as it is troubling. And of Aazco? "He worked not only for himself," writes Wheeler "but for an abstract ideal of civilization; not just for the present, but for the future."

There are those who work obsessively and ceaselessly at breaking new ground, and then there are those for whom trailblazing is just a hey-no-big-thing. Include professional surfer Lisa Andersen in the latter group. Even as her sport has ridden the buzzy imagery of youth, hipness, and fresh-faced iconoclasm, surfing and its attendant beach culture have also seemed hopelessly macho, locked in a sun-kissed Stone Age with regard to its treatment of women. Andersen, an unflappable, 27-year-old single mother from Florida, is burying the old conventions using her unmatched skill, power, and grace on a surfboard. But as Martha Sherrill reports--after having caught up with Andersen recently at the U.S. Open in Huntington Beach, California--this surfer isn't completely comfortable with the pioneer role: "She's an indifferent icon, at best." In "Gidget Kicks Ass," Andersen, a two-time world champion who is shooting for her third title this month, is rendered as a rebel without a particular cause: "Brusque, monosyllabic, impossible to read behind her sunglasses, she has no giant need to be adored or fawned over, and certainly no great inclination to play the role of crusader. You could say she's tearing down barriers, but she's no Susan B. Anthony of surf either."

Ambivalence is not a sentiment elicited by a visit to the seemingly endless chaos of Haiti, as contributing editor Bob Shacochis--who explores his relationship with the island this month--knows only too well. He has struck up a winsome romance with the place, a beautiful if exceedingly complex nation unfortunately (and ignorantly) typed for most Americans as an eternal circus of voodoo and political unrest. Shacochis dives beneath this veneer, seeking a kernel of redemption for the country. "What does Haiti mean to me? Nothing. Everything," he writes in his impassioned, hopeful ode, " There Must Be A God in Haiti." So much of the country looked ruined--blowtorched, gouged, raked, and blasted. But there was another Haiti, a lost Haiti, in those dense, misty mountains on the horizon."

Other items of note: contributing editor John Brant heads to Mexico and the blown-out crater of Xinantecatl, a sacred volcano once used by the Aztecs for human sacrifice. Today it's a training ground, drawing Mexico's finest distance runners, who hone their bodies and minds in the thin air. Though accomplished as a group, the Mexicans haven't quite made running's highest ranks, occupied by the likes of the Kenyans and Ethiopians; by breaking themselves on Xinantecatl, they hope to remake themselves as the world's elite. Finally, on the theme of makeovers, we offer up our to guide to this month's elections, with some evocative--and at times provocative--writing. The burning questions this go-round: Why is the environment suddenly a hot, hot political topic again? Would President Dole really be an environmental disaster? Just what type of brown-out legislation has Newt Gingrich wrought, and who can be counted on to stop it? And, finally, which of the groovy presidential candidates can boogie down on roller skates? Hint: You go, Bob!