Puertas

Peru was magnificent; beautiful country, beautiful people. Rather than try to describe things in great detail I have opted to construct a handful of photo essays of sorts arranged around certain themes, which I will try to extend beyond the obvious elements one usually associates with Peru- mountains, deserts, rainforests, all that, the grand landscape size things. Which are nice, but I've always felt that the true beauty and wonder of a place lay in the small less noticed things.

This one is of doorways I came across while wandering around the streets of the town of Casmas on the Pacific Coast north of Lima. We stopped at Casmas while traveling north of the Pan-American Highway; it was a wonderful respite from the everlasting barren tear-your-heart-out lonely beautiful emptiness of the desert. Our stop consisted of a clean crisp little restaurant that specialized in seafood- Casmas is a coastal city- where I ate some excellent fried squid on a bed of slightly less fried yucca, which was also delicious. After eating I strolled around, past a little park with its whitewashed trees radiobellowing warhero monuments and a few older men sitting on benches eyeing the gringo. The nearby market was rather low on vendors; a few rather moldy pieces of fruit some turkeys and chickens, and lots of cheap shoes and plasticish odds and ends. But for some reason I mainly noticed the doors while walking the sidewalks crowded by vendors basketsellers sleeping dogs and the occasional triwheeler taxi (mototaxi in Peru, sanlanshi in China, autorickshaw in India).

Doors are heavy with metaphysical, poetical signifiance, besides being imminently useful in regulating the flow of things into a structure. They cross from one precint to another; and in many parts of the world the passage from external to internal in a residence is a very dramatic one, from austerity perhaps to grandeur. Or it may stand that the door itself is the decoration and beauty of a place. There were many doors in Casmas that drew the eye much more strongly than the structure they were ensconsed in. I know nothing further about the significance invested in these portals; where they lead, who has passed through them (and perhaps never passed back through), how many currents have met and mingled through them and how long they will serve as means of passage within the cosmos of Casmas.