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272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 2, 2021
The route toward the heart of the city featured a schoolyard and school building to the left and the photo-worthy view I had admired to the right. I set out toward the city, gripping the camera in my left hand and walking faster. I had spent about half an hour sightseeing and taking photos, and I felt guilty that I was not offering Joe a hand despite his insistence that he had it all under control.The author after the, these days, almost obligatory anti-Trump rant, "had spent the 14 months battling a U.S. political system she said rewards candidates who raise the most money over those who propose creative solutions to the country’s myriad problems." But, "Phoenix finished a distant fourth in 2018's Democratic primary for the 25th congressional district in Southern California".
Calle Resbalosa ended in a small plaza with a large fountain in the middle. The plaza was the entrance to the school I was walking next to, and I could see excited kids emerging into the open space. They yelled and darted, impromptu games of tag beginning and ending too fast to determine a winner. A couple in their twenties lingered by the fountain, immersed in each other’s gazes, struggling mightily to ignore the shrieks of liberated ten-year-olds. I walked closer, crossing from the small boulder field of Resbalosa street onto the smooth stone of the plaza. A particularly zealous group of tag players brushed past me and I looked around for more, not wanting to be kneecapped by tiny bodies.
I never saw the sewer.
Even if I had been looking down, I probably would have stepped on it anyway. Over the years, I have set foot on countless sewers, manhole covers, and other small subterranean entrances typically capped with solid metal or grates. We all do, since common practice in most places with enough infrastructure to warrant underground plumbing dictates that all grates and covers are securely fastened closed or barricaded from contact with the public. Somewhere, a Peruvian utility worker sits oblivious to the havoc their carelessness wrought on both my body and research expedition, before I had even begun the risky part of the journey.
My white Nike Air Max cross-trainer hit the rectangular steel sewer cover and kept on going, forcing the cover down into the stuff it was supposed to keep out of sight—and far, far out of mind. One side of my body plunged down, the ground beneath my right foot suddenly exchanged for foul brown soup. My upper body heaved forward, still driven by the momentum of that last fateful step.