We took a right turn off the Pan American highway and drive several miles along a gravel road to the tiny town of Puerto Lomas. Fishing was no longer a major source of work for ordinary Peruvians along the coast; industrial-scale ocean fishing had long ago driven most of them out of business. But Puerto Lomas still had enough people fishing, for the restaurant trade or for their own consumption, to feel like a real port town. It smelled like seaweed and rotting fish. Little boys ran along the piers, nonchalantly jumping into the deep water and leaping out again and again. The specialty in the restaurants was an extraordinarily tasty fried sole. There were also huge crabs that people pulled out of the surf, red monsters with legs eight inches long. I don’t think we ate many of those.
The town of Puerto Lomas was at the south end of what seemed like an infinitely long stretch of yellow-sand beach, separated from the endless desert inland by a long dune perhaps a dozen feet high. We ate fish at a restaurant in the town, then my Dad turned his Land Rover onto the sand and headed out along the breakers. A mile or two north, he chose a spot according to criteria of his own, and we piled out and began to set up camp. There was one large olive-green army-surplus tent for the kids, another slightly smaller one for the parents, and a third medium-sized tent to hold the food and cooking stuff.
We spent our mornings hiking north along the beach, watching the surf for the penguin corpses that the cold Pacific current habitually deposited along the South American coast as it flowed up from Antarctica. We weren’t supposed to touch them, but we made sure to get very close looks.
On the landward side of the long low dune that separated the beach from the desert there was a strip of sun-bleached crab shells and fish bones. There must have been a heavy traffic of crabs coming up here to die over the years, because you could often be crunching ankle-deep in their remains. The predominant crab on these beaches had a red-orange, squarish body a couple of inches across and hung out in large herds on the wet strip of sand, dashing sideways into deceptively small holes in the sand when they saw us coming.
On occasion we would come across a whale skeleton, lying farther inland than the other animal signs, dried out and gone bright white in the sun, grainy and pitted like old wood. A vertebra could be turned on end and sat on like a stool, and the ribs, where they were still together and upright, arched over my head. We played among these bones – we weren’t an especially reverent set of kids – but it was a little like playing in church. You felt a compulsion to keep your voice down.
One year we noticed a certain muckiness to the water for a few days, and then bird corpses began to wash up in the waves with their feathers all fused together, blackened and sticky to the touch. There had likely been an oil spill out on the ocean and this was the aftermath. We guessed that most of the birds were cormorants, a duck-like species that commonly follows freighters for their castoff food. One of them turned out to be alive, barely, and we pulled it out of the surf and named it Skippy (after our favorite peanut butter), and tried to feed it so it could stay alive long enough to slough the petroleum out of its feathers and get back in the game. It lived for a couple of days, I think, and we buried it in the dunes under a nice little shrine, with its name spelled out in seashells.