My parents believed strongly in getting out and seeing things, especially archeological sites and beaches, neither of which was much in evidence in the places they came from. There was one beach in the port city of Callao, next to Lima, made of rocks the size of my fists, worn smooth by the waves. I remember going there for picnics fairly often. Just south of the barriadas on Lima’s southern outskirts, near a pre-Inca ruin called Pachacamac which we explored several times, there was a wide sandy beach between two big rock outcroppings like bookends. Waves had dug a tunnel through one of these rocks, and if you squinted just right you could make the rock look like a lion lying with its head up and its front paws in the surf. The beach was called Leon Durmiente, Sleeping Lion.

I think there were three summers when Dad wrapped everything up for a month and took us on a 6-hour drive down that coast to a town called Puerto Lomas, or Port of the Hills. I don’t know how he chose that particular place. Two of those times, my mother’s mother was visiting us. Her husband, a minister, had died a year earlier and she had retired from her job as the organist at their church in Ashland, a small town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior. She had always liked reading National Geographic stories about Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples, and this was her chance to see the real thing.

To get to Puerto Lomas you had to go through Nazca, a town that had taken shape in the desert near a place where people before the Incas had drawn these huge, vaguely significant markings on the vast, flat desert floor. This part of the coastal desert was not the movie-standard desert of shifting sand dunes that we were used to. Here the ground was as flat as an airstrip for as far as you could see, except for some low foothills where the desert began to give way to the Andes foothills, and it was covered with small dark rocks sitting on top of a layer of powdery, off-white dust. Thousands of years ago someone had methodically picked up the rocks in long lines and laid them aside, exposing the dust, so that from a distance it looked like someone had drawn on the ground with a thin stick of chalk. Some of the lines projected as straight as a ruler along the desert floor and up into the hills, oblivious to the topography. Other lines twisted around on themselves and made strangely schematic pictures of monkeys, spiders and birds, each laid out over as much as a square mile of ground.

Naturally, the place had drawn the attention of all kinds of scientists and oddballs from the US and Europe. A Swiss guy named Erich von Daniken had published a couple of bestsellers about how early humans had been prodded into civilization by visitors from other planets; the evidence relied heavily on speculations about the artwork at famous archeological sites like Chichen Itza in Mexico and Macchu Picchu and Nazca in Peru. I loved this stuff. Hippie tourists from Germany and the United States, and the occasional Bible-thumping Protestant missionary, frequently came to pay tribute to or gather intelligence on whatever they thought they saw there.

Some mainstream academics had tried to make sense of the place by quantifying its artifacts and cataloguing its symbols. A.L. Kroeber, known for his association with the famous native American survivor he named Ishii, went to Nazca in the 1920s to try to count things up. The chief proponent of this approach was Maria Reich, a German mathematician who thought the lines and curves could be interpreted as some sort of calendar or guide to the Nazca people’s cosmology, and one could measure the angles to figure out what pointed to where. She had gone to Nazca in the 1950s to do this, and was still working at it when we came through in 1969 or 1970.

We reached the town of Nazca, just north of the archeological site, in the afternoon and checked into a hotel that had a swimming pool and some nice broad shade trees to counter the roasting desert sun. In the morning, after our oatmeal and café con leche, my brother and sister and I went out to the pool. A dark-skinned man lounging on one of the chaise longues asked me where we were from. I said, “Somos americanos.” “So am I,” he told me. “So is everyone here,” he added, gesturing at the other swimmers, the pool cleaner and the women carrying towels in and out of the rooms. “Don’t forget that.” I don’t think I’ve ever said the word “American” since then without thinking about that guy.

My Dad, Mom and grandmother had been debating for days whether to try to see the Nazca lines while we were there. Maria Reich had a reputation for guarding her site fiercely. She had been known to chase amateurs off at slight provocation, throwing stones and insults. It wasn’t surprising, when you saw the macho jeep tracks blasted across the ancient markings, and the Pan American highway cutting right across the whole site, as straight as any of the lines. In the town we had caught sight of a man unloading a station wagon, a missionary from the look of him, with white dust covering his sandals and irritation on his face. My Dad said someone had told him Reich had chased the man off the site just that afternoon.