Abeyance

Abeyance- a state of disuse, dormancy, or suspension

Ex: We peeled back the dense overgrowth of brush to reveal the crumbling stone ruins. We approached what looked to be a rudimentary kitchen in clear abeyance, not entirely dissimilar to what you’d see on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares (Cue Gordon Ramsay, “The state of your clay oven is bloody dismal, are you not fucking ashamed!). Our short Peruvian guide, his skin a brownish-purple, resembling an Andean mountain potato, told us that the cracked pile of earthenware and circular rocks that sat in front of the tallest remaining wall of the ancient estate was a “Pachamanca”, a cooking pit that dated back 10’s of thousands of years. The guide told us that it used to be common for the residents of this estate, and thousands of mountaintop hideouts like it, to roast cachachanca beans on the hot stones of the pit until their flesh softened and they were able to be pressed down into a bright red, grainy paste. The paste served as both sustenance—an all-purpose, calorie-dense gruel that could fuel long vertical expeditions—and holisitic ointment that could be applied to bubonic sores and other primitive jungle skin infections.

As he was extolling the virtues of this most magnificent, multifaceted bean, his face suddenly dropped. “But the cachachanca, she grows no more. She has gone the way of el dodó. If you go down to Lima, you will see nothing except ceviche in the restaurants and Neosporin in the hospitals! You, you people, *he points at a fragile Chinese tourist, his tone growing more hostile* you will never know the power of the cachachanca! You will never know how it heals! *He now jams his pointer finger into the sternum of the Chinese tourist* You will never know how it tastes! You will never know how it feels to fuck after eating a cachachanca!”

*The other tour guide steps in and puts him in a full nelson, dragging him away from our group* “perdónale, perdónale” he begs of the assemblage of hikers, each of us now looking around at one another, at a loss for what we have just witnessed. The distraught Chinese tourist is being embraced and comforted by her husband, her face nestled in the crook of his arm. Would we ever make it to Machu Picchu? Between the altitude sickness, the recently-revealed-to-be a raving lunatic of a tour guide, and the hundreds of other stone huts and stories of magical aphrodisiac legumes that stood in our path, we weren’t quite sure.