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More than one hundred fifty villages line the shores of Lake Titicaca. No two have identical landscapes. Much as a quick look is sufficient to recognize the face of a friend whom one meets unexpectedly when walking down a street in a strange town, so too a traveler around the lake needs only a single glimpse to recognize a familiar village that comes suddenly into view when riding a boat on a new route around an island or when crossing the crest of a ridge for the first time. It is enough to see the clusters of adobe houses, set in the recesses of the hills that rise up suddenly from the flat farmlands by the lake, in order to know that this village is Yanaque. The mind does not need to pause and reflect in order to distinguish it from Socca with its broad bands of scattered houses and fields, separated by low shrub-filled streambeds that run from the peninsula's high rocky spine to the lakeshore. Nor would one ever confuse Yanaque, even for an instant, with Piata, set in a narrow valley flanked with groves of eucalyptus trees and the stone walls of sheep corrals. As with human faces, each village acquires its distinctiveness from a specific combination of common features. If the features of human faces are eyes and noses and mouths, foreheads and cheeks and chins, those of the lakeshore villages are hills, plains and the shoreline; pastures and fields, houses and paths; and one thing more: the beds of reeds that grow in the shallow waters of the lake.

These beds are at once unvarying and endlessly diverse. Since all that can be seen in them is a single species, Scirpus tatora, known in Spanish as totora, Quechua and Aymara as t'utura, these beds are uniform. This homogeneity is unusual, since most wetlands throughout the world contain a variety of plant species that grow above the surface, each restricted to a band of water of a particular depth. (Like other wetlands, the reedbeds of Lake Titicaca also contains plants that are entirely submerged under the surface of the water [footnote 1]. The totora is homogenous in another way as well. Only one portion of the plant is visible: its stems. Carrying out photosynthesis through these stems, totora plants lack discernible leaves. Nor do these plants have the flowers and seeds that make other reeds, like cattails and papyrus, so distinctive. Reproducing chiefly by sprouting on the rhizomes that spread in the muck at the lake bottom, totora plants grow for several years [footnote 2] before they can form flower heads, and even these are small and inconspicuous. Many individual plants never form flowers at all. Few other ecosystems present so basic a geometry: a totora bed is nothing more than a vast array of cylinders that rise from the surface of the lake.

And yet the beds of this single species take on a great range of forms. Varying in width and shape, the totora beds are a kind of map of the lake bottom, since they indicate the zones that are between two and five meters deep, where the plant grows most successfully. The beds are commonly a few hundred meters wide, though they are narrower where the bottom drops off sharply, and in shallow areas may be as much as ten kilometers in width. Beds often form crescents that mimic and accentuate the curve of a bay, thickening in the broad shallow regions at the middle, and narrowing at the steeper zones at the edges. In other areas, the reeds are entirely absent. Where hillsides plunge down to the depths, the bottom is often so rocky and exposed to severe waves that the totora cannot take root and grow.

The totora also varies in their thickness and height, since the villagers harvest reeds from the beds. This harvesting, ordinarily done in rectangular sections, is often spread over a number of months, and the totora may be left to regrow for a year or more. As a result, a single bed may look like an enormous patchwork quilt composed of pieces of fabric of varying textures and colors: the intense green nubs of newly emerging plants; the dark greens of the mature plants, whose firm stalks may be much as three or four meters tall; the lighter beige and straw tones of the oldest stems, dried by long exposure to wind and to frost. As if to sew these patches together with pale blue satin ribbons, narrow watery paths run between these plots. Sheltered by the high reeds, the water in these channels remains calm and reflects the sky, even when winds stir the open waters of the lake and turn them a deep blue.

If the fishing in the lake brings to mind the possibility of a museum, the harvesting of totora seems like a kind of living history exhibit. It might appear even more authentic than the sort of display in which costumed local residents recreate daily life in a colonial New England settlement or in a fort on the western frontier, since the past is reenacted all around the shores of the lake, rather than in specific locations. The reeds themselves are certainly the same species that has been present for centuries. But it is not the vegetation alone that gives this sense of great continuity. A tour promoter who wished to set up a living history exhibit about traditional plant use in the altiplano could simply bring visitors to the shore of the lake in totora-planting season. These visitors could watch the villagers pole their balsas into areas where the totora is densest. They pull entire plants from the muck at the bottom of the lake, making sure to get a significant mass of roots and rhizomes. The villagers poke around the base of plants that do not come out easily in order to loosen them. When they have enough plants, they carry them to the planting zones. They wade into the water and use spades to open up spots in which they root the plants. If they wish to plant in water too deep to stand in, they go out in balsas. Once they reach the zone of appropriate depth, they use poles to push the clumps of roots and rhizomes into the bottom, or drop into the water clumps that are weighted down with stones.