by Tim Cahill
America, however, had produced something the students found dreadful and atrocious. It was called “techno music,” but the U.S. government, as far as Luis and Monica could tell, was not entirely at fault. We pulled out onto the Pan American Highway behind the burning tires, and dropped the students off to join their cohorts in protest.
We soldiered on through the rain, and turned off the Pan American Highway, east at Ambato, and drove through a small town called Pelileo, where police had barricaded the road to Baños. We convinced the officers that we were world-famous journalists, here to cover the evacuation of Baños and the eruption of Tungurahua. They let us through and we plowed down a steep grade in the general direction of the Amazon jungle. About five miles later we encountered another barricade, this one manned by the military, professional soldiers who, it seemed, didn’t give a rat’s ass if we were famous international journalists, movie stars, or astronauts. No one was allowed past the checkpoint.
But we had permission from the Institute of Geophysics, in Quito, to visit with scientists studying the mountain: the Americans Patty Mothes and Peter Hall.
“Ah, well,” the soldiers said, “you moronic little turds,” or words to that effect. In fact, we’d passed the house where the scientists were staying. It was up the hill and down a gravel road that forked many times in many directions.
In the end, we piled a pair of soldiers in the backseat and they escorted us to the house, just as the students had directed us around their own barricades. The Geophysical Observatory had been donated to the Institute of Geophysics—a teaching institution that studies earthquakes and volcanic activity in Ecuador—by a prominent local chicken farmer, and was a long white building with a red-tile roof and large picture windows. Each of the windows was taped with a big yellow X so that, in our headlights, the place looked like someone who’d been knocked seriously unconscious in a cartoon. The tape, the soldiers said, was a protection against the window-shattering sound of an eruption. Tungurahua, they said, was about ten miles away. We could actually hear it, a series of avalanches rumbling faintly in the distance.
There were soldiers camped outside the observatory in a large green canvas tent. A Sergeant Aedo escorted us into the house, where Patty Mothes was talking with a group of people who’d been evacuated from Baños. The group was well dressed—some men in coats and ties, women in dresses. Also present was a Colonel Yepes, who prefaced many of his statements about the possibility of an imminent eruption with the words “Please believe me …”—because, it appeared, the people didn’t believe him.
The delegation from Baños wanted to return to their town, if only for a few hours. They had been evacuated for nearly two months. The people wanted to have a High Mass and a solemn parade. They wanted to do it on Sunday, five days from today. It would be a symbolic homecoming.
Patty Mothes admitted that the mountain had been quiet, seismically, of late. Sunday was a possibility. Colonel Yepes, reluctantly it appeared, okayed the five-hour return to Baños, and when the meeting was over we explained to the colonel that we were world-famous journalists and would need to accompany the people to their evacuated home. The colonel, who exuded Latin graciousness, told us there would be provisions made for the press, but the underlying message was that, frankly, he didn’t give a rat’s ass who we were.
No matter. We were going to Baños on Sunday and that was that.
In my quest to advance the cause of science, I was jumping up and down on solid rock at about fourteen thousand feet, just under the glaciers of Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest mountain, an inactive volcano rising 20,702 feet. Buried under my feet were a couple of geophones, sensitive devices meant to measure the movement of the rock, and convert that trembling into an electronic signal. At 210 pounds, I was the heaviest in our party, and the man most likely to advance the cause of science in this case.
Rob Howard and I had accompanied Peter Hall and his Ecuadorian associate, Viniceo “Feny” Cárceres, to the middle slopes of Chimborazo to make some adjustments to one of the more important seismic stations in the world.
The radio receiver in Peter’s hand hummed with a single tone, like a mezzo-soprano holding a note.
“Okay, now jump again,” Peter instructed me, and I did.
The note wavered.
“Keep jumping.”
The sound coming from the receiver was now like that of a mezzo-soprano holding the note on horseback at a full gallop.
“We bring these receivers up the active volcanoes,” Peter said. “When they make this wavering, waffling sound, we know the rocks below are moving. It’s time to get down quick.”
“Those guys who died on Pinchincha,” I said, “didn’t they have one of those receivers?”
“They shouldn’t have been there anyway,” Peter Hall said as the note continued to flutter long after my last jump. “They were told not to go.”
“Weren’t they students of yours?”
Peter had been the director of the Institute of Geophysics at the time.
“It was in May of ninety-three,” Peter said.
“What happened?”
“We’re interested,” Rob said, “because we’re going up there Saturday.”
Peter looked to where the glaciers started, less than one thousand feet above us. The seismic station was set on a rock ledge at about fourteen thousand feet, on the northwest slope of the mountain. Below us the rock face gave way to what is called the puna, a steeply sloping grassland that looked rather like the moors of Scotland, minus the heather. Instead, there were blocky outcroppings of gray, lichen-encrusted rock set in a marshy valley full of tufted yellow grass. Everything was the color of a rainy autumn day.
Our cars were down there, about seven hundred feet below, parked on a muddy dirt road. It had been a stiff climb for Peter and Feny because they were both carrying thirty-pound car batteries in awkward, external-frame packs modified for the purpose. The land was boggy at first, and we stepped from tussock to tussock. Overhead, one of the last one hundred condors in Ecuador cut lazy circles through a dismal gray sky. On the ground before us, a dozen or so vicuña, slender and elegant, saw no reason to deviate from their grazing line. They called to one another in odd, high-pitched chirps and passed about fifty yards ahead of us: golden-brown animals with brilliant white bellies and long, graceful necks. Vicuña are related to llamas in the way that Fred Astaire is related to Ernest Borgnine.
Feny refused any help with the batteries, as did Peter, who had lived in Ecuador for twenty-eight years. (And people make machismo out to be a bad thing.) They struggled through the marsh to the rocks, then scrambled up another several hundred feet, gasping and bent double under the weight of the cruel batteries.
The seismic station itself consisted of a fifty-five-gallon drum buried in the ground and covered over with a solar panel. It read a signal from the geophones, buried deeper in the ground, and sent the signal to the Institute of Geophysics in Quito from an antenna set on an outcropping fifty feet above us. The station was powered by car batteries, which were charged by the solar panel. The batteries had to be replaced about once a year. Which was why we were there, standing on the ledge, waiting for Peter to tell us about the deaths on Pinchincha.
A dense fog drifted in from the north, and our world was a single shade of gray. Peter shook his head. “They were told not to go,” he said again. “My wife—you met her last night, Patty?—had been in the crater the day before and she’s the one who said, ‘No, there’s been a change of activity.’ She thought there were more explosions coming on. She went back to the institute and said, ‘Hey, there’s something happening in Pinchincha.’ One of the students, Victor, said, ‘Oh, we should go up there and get some samples.’ Patty said it was too dangerous. But Victor rounded up another student and they went up there early the next morning.
“Victor called down on the radio about ten that morning. Said he was up there. About eleven, the seismographs at the institute registered an explosion on Pinchincha.”<
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“Stations like this one here,” I said.
“Exactly. There are several of them up there. We were concerned about Victor. And then we couldn’t reach him on the radio. They didn’t come out that afternoon.
“So the next morning I went up to the summit with another fellow. We stood on the rim and then walked halfway down into the crater. That’s when I saw them. With binoculars. Two bodies covered in ash at the bottom of the crater.”
“What killed them,” I asked, “ash? Poison gas?”
“No, they got impacted in the chest and face by rocks, big blocks …”
“You’d call it a cannonade?”
“I don’t know if there’s a good term for it, but, yeah, that captures the idea.”
Rob and I thought about this for a moment. Pinchincha, for obvious reasons, was closed to casual hiking, but after much discussion and many visits to various offices, we’d obtained a variety of permissions from the institute and the military.
“Who’re you going up with?” Peter asked.
“Nine-one-one,” I said. This is Quito’s emergency-response squad as well as its search-and-rescue organization.
“They’ll be in radio contact with the institute,” Peter said. “So do what they tell you.”
Well, that’s good thinking there, Peter, I thought, as a sudden, stiff wind ripped the fog to shreds and the condor wheeled above.
“Could you jump again?” Peter asked. “We’re checking the telemetry here. How the radio signal travels all the way to the institute in Quito.” There was no cellular phone link at Chimborazo, so Peter was speaking on a handheld radio to a person about thirty miles away, who simultaneously phoned each jump into the institute at Quito, where my hard-rock trampoline act was being recorded digitally. Quito called back and said, in effect, that the fat guy was coming in loud and clear.
“All right,” Peter said, “they’re getting the signal. Now jump again. We’ll do a polarity test. What we want to know here is: When a wave comes up from below, does the rock sink first, or does it rise first? When you jump, you’re pushing the rock down, so we can see how the geophone responds to it.”
“How sensitive is this station?” I asked, more than a little breathless. “I mean, is it just for Chimborazo?”
“Oh no,” Peter said. “On good, massive rock like this—and if an earthquake or eruption is big enough—we can pick up events from anywhere in the world. This is a vitally important station for activity in Peru, in Colombia. We report the data worldwide and it is used in calculating where the earthquake was, and how big it was. They use better stations, like the one in Pasadena, California, but this one helps, especially if the event is down in South America. Then this would be a critical station.”
There were many other seismic stations along von Humboldt’s Avenue of the Volcanoes in Ecuador, the most problematic being the one on Cotopaxi. The institute had sent teams of strong, young students with technical climbing experience up into the snowfields and glaciers, but they’d been stopped three times running.
“Don’t you have a lot of world-class climbers coming to Ecuador?” I asked. “I bet you could get some good people to volunteer their help.”
“Well, no,” Peter said. “We tried that. No one wants to do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because a car battery,” he said sorrowfully, “is an intensely objectionable object to carry up a mountain.”
Feny, meanwhile, was about to solder a resistor into the electronic guts of the station. This device would cause the geophones not to overreact to a vibration. Because all the geophones at all the seismic stations in the country had been standardized in the same way, scientists at the institute were able to calibrate the magnitude of an earthquake or an eruption.
Feny looked up from his work. “I need the oscilloscope now,” he said.
Peter looked around at the gear spread out around the station, and did not like what he saw. A great sorrow clouded his face. “I thought you brought it,” he said in a small sad whispery voice.
And then we looked down to the cars, seven hundred vertical feet below. They appeared to be about the size of a pair of cockroaches. Feny and Peter, who had, after all, carried the batteries, turned and regarded Rob and me.
“Hey,” I said, “I’ve just been jumping my heart out for science.”
“Rob looks to be in terrific shape,” Peter said.
“He’s a crackerjack,” I allowed. “A regular mountain goat.”
“The oscilloscope,” Peter said, “is in our car, in the backseat. It’s a big yellow gadget on a sling and it has an LCD window near the top. It’s about the size of a long loaf of bread.”
“Only a lot heavier,” I said heartlessly.
Rob, the designated gofer, began trudging down the steep hillside in his own reluctant quest to advance the cause of science. When he was about ten feet below us, I said: “This is what you get for being young and strong.”
“Instead of old and forgetful,” Peter added cheerfully.
Twenty or thirty minutes later, Rob was splashing through the marshy land, jumping from tussock to tussock, and only about five minutes from the car.
“Geez,” Peter said mildly, “I really hope I didn’t lock it.”
So it was a race back north, along the Avenue of Dead Dogs, the Pan American Highway, to Quito, where Pinchincha, looking mostly green and devoid of snow, loomed over the city. A reasonably fit person could walk to the lip of the crater from the city in eight or nine hours, but that would be a bad idea. Danger of eruption and serious ashfall aside, the walk winds its way up through some nasty neighborhoods where trekkers have been robbed for the contents of their backpacks, beaten up, and even raped.
Happily, Marcel Redin, the man from 911, the search-and-rescue agency, offered to drive us up past the military checkpoint, where we’d pick up our military guide, and continue on to the refuge, a kind of bunker for hikers. We also picked up Yvan, another 911 officer, and Gireya, a young woman from Lloya, a bucolic village high on the slopes of Pinchincha, a place famous for its dairy cows and cheese. She was learning about the volcano in order to inform the other villagers of its many dangers.
Marcel drove a well-maintained 911 Chevy pickup tricked out with winches and special lights. It was four in the morning and we sped through the sleeping city. There were only a few pedestrians wandering the streets. Many wore painter’s masks and goggles, indicating that it was already a bad day for ashfall in the city. Pinchincha was definitely acting up.
At the military checkpoint on the road to the summit, we picked up a sergeant of the Tiger Commandos (“We are always ready”), who introduced himself as “John Baez, mountain guide.” He carried radios, along with rescue gear and a full first-aid kit.
By now there were seven people in the truck, and Marcel threw the Chevy into four-wheel as we careened over the muddy path in the dark. He knew the road, which was good, because the headlights were backscattered badly due to a light ashfall. It was like driving through a combination of fog and sandstorm.
We parked just under the summit, at the refuge building, where there was running water and a toilet, along with several simple cots. A sign on the wall suggested that trekkers refrain from going down into the crater itself. “Danger,” the sign read. “You could lose your life as a result of an explosive eruption due to the ejected fragments of rocks, due to poisonous gases …” And so on. There were a lot of ways to die in the crater.
In the spectral light of false dawn, we began trudging up the long, ash-covered talus slope to the rim of the crater, and arrived well before dawn. It was fairly clear that the mountain was active this morning, throwing up enormous amounts of ash and steam. We could see the cloud rising out of the depths of the crater, which appeared to drop below us almost a mile. A winding trail led down into the crater from our position.
There was no fire down there, only a half dozen or more places where white fumes of vaporous steam from various fumaroles rose straig
ht up out of the lumpy, ash-covered soil. The ash cloud was billowing up out of the earth from somewhere else much farther back in the crater.
It was six-forty in the morning, and Yvan was calling down to the institute in Quito, reporting the ceniza, the cloud of ash and steam that now rose about a mile and a half over our heads. It was, said Sergeant John Baez, a fairly significant eruption. Happily, we were standing on the east rim of the crater, and the wind was at our backs, blowing the ash off over the virtually uninhabited areas to the west of the mountain.
The lip of the crater was 14,800 feet high, according to my altimeter, and the sky above was a pale blue interspersed with a few puffy white clouds. The ash kept rising, but the process was entirely and eerily silent. As the sun rose, the ash cloud—previously dark and malevolent—began to show its true colors. It was a subtle shade of salmon pink, a combination of steam and pulverized rock. The eruption continued for several minutes, and the cloud grew, billowing out at the edges near the top. Heavier bits of rock and cooling steam began to fall along the sides of the column, which was now mushroom shaped: well over a mile wide at our position, and four or five times that above.
I looked to the south and saw we had climbed above the clouds, which lay at about ten thousand feet, a perfectly flat layer of glittering white which took on the colors of the rising sun. The world below looked like nothing so much as a watercolor painting that might be titled “Abstract in Pastels.”
And rising up out of the clouds on all sides were the volcanoes of Ecuador. I could see Cotopaxi, which had defeated the institute’s climbers three times recently. It looked like the archetype of all volcanoes, perfectly shaped and snowcapped. Chimborazo lumped up just to the west, and Tungurahua—east of Chimborazo, south of Cotopaxi—was spitting out an evil column of foul black ash, easily seen against the pallid blue sky. The world consisted solely of volcanoes, some of them in eruption, and all of them rising up out of an Abstract in Pastels.
Yvan, who was still talking to the institute in Quito, said that they were getting some ominous readings from our position and that we should be prepared to evacuate.
