A few weeks ago I achieved a lifelong dream by publishing my first book. It’s a coming-of-age memoir about my awkward high school years—kind of like Sixteen Candles if that annoying kid who asked Molly Ringwald out on a date wrote a book about his life. As it turns out writing a book and selling a book are two different skillsets, and now that I’ve sort of figured out how to do the first one I’m now fumbling around on the second. The hard cover, paperback, and ebook are all out now and easy to find on my new website csbeaty.com— but I just started recording the files for the audio book. I wanted to share the first couple of chapters. It’s like the free chips and salsa at the Mexican restaurant that are designed to make you starve for the entree. Feel free to order the full meal.
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.1
-C.S. Lewis
As the Incans expanded their empire, several indigenous groups fled to the islands of Lake Titicaca to avoid conquer. While the Incans were good at climbing mountains, they were shit at swimming. So, like the second Avatar movie, which is just a water version of the first Avatar movie, a group of castaways sought a liquid sanctuary. They isolated themselves from foes, but also from everything else. They cared for their families and looked out for their friends. They became self-sustaining and culturally incestuous by adapting their way of life to their new surroundings. And for centuries, little changed.
Incredibly, these islanders still exist. Even when the Incans were no longer a threat, they decided to stay put. After the Incans came Fernando Pizarro, who planted the Spanish flag in conquest and taught savages to become proper Catholics. After Spanish rule came Simón Bolívar, who reclaimed South America so it could be ruled by oligarchs. After oligarchs came drug lords, socialists, corrupt corporations, and more oligarchs. As the outside world shifted and civilizations crumbled, the residents of Lake Titicaca sold fish and stayed out of trouble.
Commercial fishing and environmental hardships have made it harder to sustain a family with a net and a boat, so today most of the islanders make money from tourism. My wife told me about these people while she was planning a trip to Peru. She’s a high school Spanish teacher and each year someone in her department gets to take a group of students to a Spanish-speaking country. Her turn was coming up, and she had heard great things about the two-day excursion to visit these island people. Because my wife is popular with the students at her high school, she had no problem filling the trip with enough bodies to earn a free ticket for both her and me. So, in the summer of 2024, the two of us joined thirty other students and chaperones to see these islands for ourselves.
Lake Titicaca has over a hundred man-made floating islands crafted out of reeds. As they grow, the roots of the reeds naturally intertwine underwater, and using primitive handsaws, the islanders cut out cubes of these roots and lash them together. The blocks are left to sit for about a week so the living roots can weave the parcels together and form a floating mass. Dried reeds are thrown on top to form a matted surface, and then the island is move-in ready.
Stepping foot on one of these floaters feels like you’re walking on a waterbed. A single island is a few hundred square feet and home to a handful of households consisting of families and close friends. Scant solar panels provide the most basic of electricity, but there is no indoor plumbing. Only outdoor. In a lake. There seemed to be little privacy, but despite spending several hours meeting numerous families, I never saw anyone pooping outside. They figured out how to make it work. People are good at adapting to their surroundings.
We were given a presentation on floating island life by the president of Isla Pato Corazón. The various islands rotate hosting visitors so the lucrative tourist dollars can be spread throughout the communities. Most residents spend their days creating items to sell, like elaborate tapestries or miniatures of the elegant boats crafted from the same reeds their homes are built upon. From collecting duck eggs to waiting for a motorboat to take kids to school, the mundane tasks necessary in any culture are shaped by their environment. Including romance.
In rural Nebraska, teenagers drive to a secluded cornfield to make out in the front seat of a Toyota Camry, but in the floating islands they use a “bota romantica.” Just large enough for two full-grown adults and bedded with loose reeds, these sex rafts are shared between islanders for when the need arises. It takes some advance planning, but if a couple wants alone time away from curious eyes and attentive ears, one of these woven canoes can be checked out and discreetly piloted into the thick cover of the growing reeds so the two can get freaky.
I taught the canoeing merit badge during a summer job at a Boy Scout camp, so I am very familiar with what maneuvers would be difficult to perform in a boat. Having sex is one of them.
I bought a miniature bota romantica as a souvenir. I sent my wife a postcard of the full-size sex raft as a memento of our trip.
…
I was impressed but not surprised that these islanders figured out a fix for this intimacy problem. As the foggy sex car scene in Titanic vividly demonstrates, adolescent resourcefulness knows no bounds when the need for some fondling arises. But the problem I always found more confounding wasn’t what to do once you’re horny, but rather: how do you find the woman willing to be the skipper on your boner boat in the first place?
In addition to the floating islands, Lake Titicaca has forty-two “natural islands.” After leaving the floating island of Isla Pato Corazón, we boarded a ferry for a two-hour trip to see how island life differed on one of these permanent sites. Our tour guide grew up on one of these natural islands and told us how things worked where he was from. His native language was Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by the first water settlers. Not all the islands speak Aymara, and our tour guide’s Spanish was rudimentary enough that he and I could converse without confusing one another. He told us about mermaids and fishing, but his best story was how he asked his wife out on a date.
When his grandfather was a lad, it was tradition to take a flute to a particular beach and play a beautiful melody. If a young lady was impressed (or turned on) by the flute playing, she approached the flautist. They started chatting, and if things clicked, they got married. Over generations the art of flute playing was lost. Technology changed and kids no longer had an interest in learning skills where a digital alternative was available. Just as email and MSN Messenger replaced sonnets and letter writing, listening to woodwind music couldn’t compete with the sensual beats available through radio signals. But despite the progress of the industrial age, a dude still needs to figure out how to get a date. And conveniently, instead of learning the flute, now you can just buy a boom box.
When our tour guide came of age, he left his island and voyaged to the far-off shores of the mainland. Fighting back the demons of congested traffic and avoiding the sirens of knockoff Nike apparel sold on a street corner, our hero exchanged his life savings of disposable income to purchase a portable CD player from a home electronics store. Like John Cusack in Say Anything, the eligible bachelor picked the most stirring serenade from his music collection and returned to the beach of his grandfather to blast the love song in the vicinity of the island’s young hotties.
I asked our guide what he played to meet his wife. It was an easy question.
“Enrique Iglesias. Claro.”
…
But different rules have evolved on different islands. To an outsider, a culture’s customs can sound arbitrary and absurd—but to those within, the rituals seem completely natural. Habitual. Instinctual. The place you live defines what you consider normal, and it isn’t until you look from a distance that you can see how strange those “normal” practices might be.
And on the island of Taquile, everything centers around knitting a hat.
Taquile is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is recognized as having some of the best knitting on the planet. Once you understand the stakes, it’s easy to understand why. As soon as his son is born, a father is required to knit him a hat. The hat is floppy with frills on the edge resembling doilies, and the kid has to wear the thing everywhere he goes. This mark of childhood follows him through his awkward teenage years, and before he can shed this embarrassing bonnet and call himself a man, he must prove himself. And that means knitting himself a new hat.
And unless he wants to be a total loser, he better do a damn good job.
To transition from childhood to adulthood, the young man knits a long cap with a red bottom, white top, and a multi-colored pom-pom. This particular design means you’re single, and if you are ready to mingle, that pom-pom gets flipped to the side like the tassel on a graduation cap.
So, let’s say you finished your hat, and you think you did a pretty good job. How do you get the girls to notice you?
If the knitting is nice and tight, there won’t be a lot of floppiness. The hat will stand nice and stiff on top of the young man’s head. If a young woman sees his erect cap sticking above the other boys’ flaccid hats, she knows the bachelor took the task seriously. He’s probably the kind of guy who would take a relationship seriously as well. If you want to know who the shitty boys are, they’re probably the ones with the shitty hats. If a hat catches her eye, the young lady will approach the young man and let him know she appreciates his knitting. So far, so good.
Meeting your girlfriend’s parents is nerve wracking. It can take a while to build trust and earn their approval, but in Taquile the process is streamlined. When the girl brings the boy to meet her parents, the dad plucks the hat from the lad’s head and fills it with water. And they wait. For two minutes. If the hat holds without any serious leakage, the couple has their blessing. But if he did a shitty job and knitted some loosely crocheted hipster beanie, then the whole thing is off.
In the words of my guide: “The parents, they will hate this boy.”
A leaky hat is almost impossible to overcome, but in every culture a daughter’s tears hold a special power over even the sternest of parents. If the girl really loves the boy despite his lazy character and lack of attention to detail, she can appeal the ruling by begging her folks for a second chance. But he can only get one. That’s it. He better not fuck it up. It takes several months to knit a proper hat, and the boy has to start from scratch.
But if this next hat is good, the young lady has found her soulmate. They can start the wedding planning.
…
I bought a hat as a souvenir. It’s floppy as hell. I never was good with women.
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1936), 1.
