The only TV we had seen in the last four years had been a tiny black-and-white tabletop model that my Dad had borrowed for us to watch the Apollo 11 launch. There was some kind of delay, and it was after breakfast before the countdown got down into the minutes. The hired car had arrived to take us to school, and the kids who were already in it piled into our kitchen, and all our mouths hung open until the rocket was a speck at the tip of a long white line.

Anyway, in Chicago at last, our grandparents picked us up and drove us the three hours to Madison, where my father’s father was the pastor of a Lutheran Church a few blocks from the state capitol building, with a parsonage next door. A few days there, then back in the car to drive eight hours to Ashland, on the south shore of Lake Superior, where my mother’s mother still lived. Ashland would be our base for the six months in the US.

Ashland was a little surprising to a kid who had pretty much assumed that the things in the US were pretty well squared away. This was one of the towns that had been drained by the industrial decline of the 1960s. If you’ve been to Lowell, Mass. or one of those other depressed industrial towns you know what it looked like. Grimy blond kids playing in the rainwater in the potholes on the street; 30-year-old men staring incuriously from park benches. The bitterest kind of cold I had ever felt: you can’t physically remember what that cold is like, because your body disbelieves it, even if your mind recalls the pain. It’s new every time you feel it. I remember coming into the house and crying while taking off my wrappings, less from any particular hurt than from the overwhelming cruelty of the cold.

We moved into the semi-separate apartment on the second floor of my Grandmother’s house, a few blocks from the church where her husband had preached until his death two years earlier. I was placed in Mrs. Jablonicky’s fifth grade at the neighborhood school, a five-block walk from the house. I was nine, a year or two younger than the rest of the kids, but early reading had put me ahead of my age group, and the rules said I had to sit with the big kids. Comparative physical prowess being the basis for social interaction in this environment, I didn’t make very many friends. For a nine-year-old I think I was pretty average, but when the time came for us all to be tested for the Presidential Physical Fitness program my peer group was the 10- and 11- and 12-year-olds of my own fifth-grade class. I did poorly at the bizarre contests, such as throwing a softball for distance. I could do perhaps two pushups, but the President wanted a dozen or so.

Some of our weekends were spent visiting Lutheran churches within driving distance of Ashland, where my Dad would take a guest preacher turn and my mother would entertain the women in the basement after the service. Her topic was the culture in which the mission effort was being carried out, and her props were her collection of folk instruments, some pictures, and her four older children in traditional Peruvian ponchos and hats singing “Jesus Loves Me” in Spanish, accompanied by her guitar. It wasn’t without payoff; after the ordeal there was usually a potluck lunch or dinner, with Pastor Kuster and his family invited to lead the buffet line. We became familiar with the range of rural Midwestern cooking: the famous casseroles and hot dishes, the coleslaws, the innumerable ways diced fruits and marshmallows can be suspended in Jello. (Any fruit except pineapple, which somehow keeps the gelatin from setting.) I still love a nice uncomplicated dinner of stuff baked together in a big pot, well salted and a little overcooked.

At a deeper level, the furlough has the function of defining and maintaining the boundaries within which a missionary and his family are expected to “go native” under the mission model in use. There is a range of choices in this. Some mission projects see their missionaries as more or less permanent parts of the lands they live in. They move in for good, adopt the local dress and language in their homes; if they have children while doing this they sometimes give them names from the adopted culture. Their furloughs tend to be far apart, sometimes skipped altogether. Many of the grown children end up missionaries themselves, and sometimes they grow up to identify themselves as part of the country where they live. People who do it this way tend to be from the more fervid wings of old-line Protestant denominations, like the Methodists, some of which got their start in missionary work in the first decades of the 20^th century. The model was not so popular with the new wave of evangelical missionaries after the second World War.

The wholesale emigrant model includes a similar degree of lifelong commitment to the project, and also the unusually high religious fervor, but the emigrants are not as interested in assimilation. In Central America we ran into occasional communities of Mennonites and Quakers who looked and behaved, as far as one could tell, exactly like their counterparts in rural Pennsylvania or Iowa. They wore the gingham dresses and bib overalls, spoke with European accents, and raised chickens or cattle pretty much as their ancestors had in the old country. They were present in foreign lands for religious reasons, but you couldn’t really call them missionaries. But like the more mainstream missionaries, their relationships with the people around them tended to eventually adapt to the familiar patron-client pattern that was so deeply rooted in Latin American economies since the colonial period.

There are lots of variations on this. One school that we went to in Costa Rica was run by an elderly Quaker couple named Bob and Marian Baker, who had moved to Costa Rica during the Vietnam war because, without an army, it seemed like a good place for pacifists. They were part of a community of maybe a few hundred Quaker families that had made the move for similar reasons. The Quakers had quickly become taken up a slot in the local economy as small farmers and traders. They kept speaking English, and sent their kids to college in the US, and in their social lives seemed to mix mostly with Americans and Europeans, but they had Costa Rican passports and didn’t intend to go back to the States. They lived in ordinary middle-class conditions, if there is such a thing, and not on common farms like the Mennonites.

Even the Mennonites had some variety. I had a friend in junior high school with the resonant name Ransford Heatwole, from a Virginia Mennonite family that had broken with the hyper-traditionalists and taken up missionary work on a model similar to the one my Dad was practicing. Their ways still placed them on the more conservative fringe of the missionaries we knew – for girls, dresses only; for men, those Abraham Lincoln beards – but their lives looked pretty much like ours otherwise.

After the war, the US pastor or lay person called to missionary service for a few years became the norm. Even among career missionaries like my Dad, who expected to spend their whole working lives in the “field,” there was little thought of integrating into the local society. Most of the people we knew assumed they would retire the way other preachers did, near their folks back home. My parents would occasionally poke fun at their own grandparents with jokes about never going back to the “old country,” but they never forgot where their center of gravity was.

We first visited the US in 1972. When you are a young child, the only place that’s real is the place where you are, and even one year is a long time to be anywhere. After four years in Lima, most of my knowledge about the US came from hearing my parents talking about it. They had not yet lost the habit of comparing and contrasting the way things were done locally to the way they were done in the US, almost always to the disadvantage of the local way. I remember being vaguely aware that there were wide streets and freeways without potholes in the US, and grandparents, and apples, peaches and evergreen trees.

For a slightly more civilized ride you could catch a “colectivo,” which was a sort of taxi that ran a regular route. This is mostly how we got around when my Dad was away with his Land Rover. The four of us stood on the sidewalk while my mother leaned into the window asking, in surprisingly good Spanish, where the car went on its way to the place named on the sign. We piled onto strangers’ laps and rode. Our favorite place to go was Parque de las Leyendas, a sort of combination zoo and theme park on the outskirts of town. We took a colectivo to an outdoor bus depot downtown, then got on a special bus to finish the trip. The park was near a collection of markets where knick-knacks for the tourist trade were sold wholesale, and tourist shops lined the boulevard that led to the park from the bus stop.

Eduardo and his family had been among the first occupants of one of the barriadas on the southern side of the city, the sand dune region. Their zone was named Emmaus at first, after the city in the story from Matthew, but in the patriotic fervor that took hold after the Velasco coup it was renamed Mariano Melgar, for a hero in the war on independence from Spain.

Being in the first wave of settlers gave the Ramoses a small edge over the later arrivals, and their house showed it because it was located in the first few blocks off the main road and large parts of it were built of brick instead of straw mats. Everyone seemed to put every spare cent they earned into their houses, putting up walls of red brick or cinder block as soon as they could, then replacing the sand floors and then the straw or zinc roofing with poured concrete. Crews of 20 or 30 men would put up a roof together by first building a thick forest of vertical poles inside the house to hold up the wet cement, then laying rectangular forms made of wired-together rebar across the top. They would build a yard-wide wooden ramp from the street in front of the house up to the roof level, with a switchback or two if needed, nailing scrap boards across it a step or so apart for traction. They would mix a giant batch of cement in the street, using the sand that was there for the taking. Then each man would fill a square bucket, about 12 inches on a side and two feel deep, hoist it on a shoulder and haul it up the ramp, ant-like, to dump it over the wood and rebar. After a few days of drying, the lumber supports would come out and there would be a new brick-and-cement bunker, lacking only water and electrical service to be a regular middle-class homestead.

The big political struggles, in fact, seemed to be over water and electricity. The highly organized character of the invasions spilled over into the struggle to get the authorities to deliver services to what were, despite their gritty reality and their dire need, still just illegal squatters’ settlements to the official world. “Invasores” would set up roadblocks with picket signs demanding a water pipe to their neighborhood, stage sit-ins at government offices, and so on. All the standard techniques of popular mobilization, either invented on the spot or adopted from India or the southern United States.

By 1969 or 70, these great masses of desperate people perched at the rim of the capital city had to be costing the local rulers some sleep. This was the time when revolutionaries elsewhere were preaching abut surrounding the cities from the countryside, and even though this particular surrounding was not instigated by any conscious method, a glance at a map would tell you it was a quite thorough surrounding. But I can’t imagine that there wasn’t someone elsewhere in government who recognized that having masses of poor people focused on such workaday development matters as water and electricity would inevitably divert their attention from the underlying, more or less permanent, and ever starker inequalities in power and wealth.

Someone must have learned something about the value of material concessions in gaining people’s acceptance of the larger economic and political status quo. That may be why the local ruling class allowed the Velasco group to throw out the feckless Belaunde and rule for a few years. Velasco’s achievements included a lot of symbolism, such as a rhetorical commitment to restore the native Quechua language as the country’s official language, but mainly he bought time for the class system in Peru, still almost as rigid and cumbersome as it had been under the viceroys, to adapt to the new conditions. After a few years, a group of more moderate generals got the nod to throw him out. They managed things for a few years and then turned it back over to Belaunde.

To get into Mariátegui, you turned left off the Pan American highway at an unmarked place where people had formed a spontaneous market and bus depot off to the left side of the road as you drove south from Lima. Rickety old buses and vans dodged women carrying big plastic mesh bags full of vegetables. At lunch stands shaded by sheets of plastic held up on bamboo legs, women fried strips of meat or cooked big pots of stew over kerosene stoves. Workers on their way home would swing off the buses and sit down on rough benches under the plastic sheets for a bite.

You proceeded up the broad, dusty main street of the barriada, which led up a slight slope at right angles to the highway, more or less where the river would have been if there were any water to drain out of this valley. Half a mile to either side, a line of hills provided the boundaries of the barriada. Sidewalks were unknown; pedestrians, children and dogs shared the space with cars and trucks. Satellite lumber yards and brick and concrete supply places alternated with the dwellings. The houses on the main drag tended to be a little more finished than average, with a greater proportion of brick and concrete to straw mats. Anywhere you turned off, straw mats would begin to predominate again a few yards in. There were no commercial establishments, like bank branches, doctors’ offices or retail stores. The economy here, huge as it was by now, operated strictly on a cash basis

The main road went on for several miles, cutting into the low, rocky hills that backstopped the coastal dunes. It petered out eventually when the ratio of level ground to hillside dropped below some unstated profitable level. To get to our house, you went about a half mile into the barriada and turned right on a street that was called 15 de abril, in honor of a battle in the war of independence, I think. You followed this street straight up to where the gravel and flinty, pocket-sized rock, which could be shaped to some degree with pick and shovel, met a strip of wheelbarrow-sized granite rubble, which couldn’t. This was the very outer edge of urbanization, and this is where my dad had come into possession of a lot to build his dream house on.

Any American in Peru in those days was involved, to some degree, in the culture of foreign aid that dominated Peruvian politics. The Kennedy administration, with its bright young economists and its mania for heading off communism, had raised hopes for a period of accelerated, state-led capitalist development that would leave Peru and its neighbors looking something like the post-Depression United States. In this scheme, Kennedy’s people had invited the assumption that the pump was to be primed with US investment, loans and grants. The part of that combination that touched the lives of ordinary people the most directly, by far, was the grants. There were warehouses around town packed with surplus soybeans, grain and powdered milk from the US, and armies of US Agency for International Development experts running around figuring out how to dispense it where people could get their hands on it.

Distribution was the weak link, which may explain why my Dad found he could routinely walk into these places and, after slapping some backs and talking some basketball, drive off with his Land-Rover filled to the ceiling with 50-pound bags of Indiana corn. In a barriada, he found, a big bag of powdered milk commanded far more attention than printed tracts or large megaphones bolted to the roof of the car. (Not that he gave up on those methods either. Anything that might work.)

I know that he worried about the effect his attention-getting technique had on the character of people’s interest in his message. I heard him talking about it with my mom and on occasion with fellow missionaries. It was impossible that there weren’t at least some people who cared nothing about the finer points of Luther’s theory of salvation exclusively by grace, but needed to supplement their children’s milk intake badly enough that they would listen patiently as long as they had to, nodding and smiling. A missionary in Asia years earlier, in a fit of ethnocentrism and callousness, had called such people “rice Christians.”

I guess my Dad decided that the risk was worth taking, because some of his church groups, such as the one in San Gabriel, began to revolve around food activities at least as much as the worship services. Before long, he and some of the local mothers had a regular breakfast program going, feeding a few dozen small children a bowl of hot oatmeal with milk every weekday morning, a few of the more outspoken mothers directing the labor. I have no idea how he drew the ratio of stomachs filled to souls won, worked his calculus of salvation, but I know that I never saw him enjoy his job more. There was a drive and a purpose about him that was different from when it was just about knocking on doors and talking about the Small Catechism.

This had been going on for a year or so when my dad decided that the church in Peru needed a central building somewhere. I think he also had noticed the incongruity of keeping his own family in a moderately privileged neighborhood far from the barriadas, and wanted to move closer to the action. He combined the two things by designing a three-story brick and concrete house with office space on the second floor and a residence on the third. He chose a location in the San Gabriel barriada, at the end of a steep street up against a low, rocky hill.

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.

I guess we spent a couple of hours walking in single file along the white lines, half-listening to the mathematician and concentrating hard on staying where we were supposed to be. I remember a long pause at a spot where Reich had stuck hundreds of sticks the shape of popsicle sticks into the ground along a particular set of curved lines, and tied string between pairs of sticks according to some complex geometric formula. She crouched there, an animated finger pointing here and there, explaining in a loud voice the relationships between this calculation and that, and I could only think about how the desert made you yearn for a popsicle.

The only thing I remember going wrong was when my straw sun hat blew off in the breeze and wheeled away over the black rocks. It was closer to another white path, but to get there without leaving the lines I’d have to walk for what seemed like miles. There was a quick conference, and then Reich nodded to signify that I could retrieve it. I stepped carefully across the black desert, not moving a stone, and when I got the hat back I jammed it on as tightly as I could.

On the ride back to her parked Toyota Reich held my sister Nicky, about a year old then, cooing at her and wondering if she would remember any of this when she came back. On the two or three-hour drive to Puerto Lomas that afternoon, my mother marveled at how out behavior had improved in the presence of the fearsome German. It didn’t seem that surprising to us.

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.

Every time we moved my dad would clean out his four or five 55-gallon oil drums, repaint them and stencil our new address on the top and sides. Into them would go all our clothes, records, toys and cooking stuff. One or two of the barrels were for books. Dad’s study had maybe 500 books, and between us the kids had another 100 or so. Some of the ones that started out Dad’s books eventually became mine by a slow process of appropriation.

My dad, in his wild youth, had acquired the strange hobby of collecting right-wing kook literature. Maybe collecting is putting it too strongly: that stuff was all over the place where he grew up, and collecting it probably amounted to little more than not throwing it away. He had a copy of the Blue Book of the John Birch society (which proved that Eisenhower was a Communist agent) and two volumes of Henry Ford’s bizarre series about the international Jewish conspiracy, and a few other things. He made a token attempt to keep this stuff on the higher shelves and out of our hands, but there wasn’t much there that I didn’t know about. There was his complete collection of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works in paperback; this was during the 70s, at the height of the pathetic windbag’s popularity.

My favorite kook was Ayn Rand, whose books my dad tried especially hard to keep secret. I happened on them, fortuitously enough, when I was about 12 or 13. An early teen is a perfectly receptive audience for appeals to logic, objectivity and most of all self-interest. I couldn’t follow the philosophical tracts (although their titles – The Virtue of Selfishness! – thrilled me), but I ate up the novels, especially We the Living, the only one that took a sort of science fiction tack. It was like a shorter, chest-beatinger version of Orwell’s wan and pitiable 1984, which I had only managed to finish because it was set in the future, so it qualified as science fiction. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were mysterious and interminable, and I read them as fast as I could by flashlight under the blankets. They each featured breathy love scenes in which women said stuff like “Take me,” and the guys did, saying nothing. And each book included a long speech by the manly hero near the end, in which the contents of the nonfiction tomes were conveniently boiled down to a dozen or so pages of concentrated rhetoric perfect for reciting to annoying teachers and parents.

Years later, when I first read Marx, I remember noticing that same thrill of clarity, and the same urge to memorize, and I’ve always wondered, running into something mentally stirring like that (Martin Luther, Roque Dalton, Trotsky), how closely the things I think are tied into the things I feel, despite all my efforts to act like I’ve reasoned things out in the approved cold, dispassionate fashion.