Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  “How do we do that?” I asked John Baez, Tiger commander and mountain guide.

  “Run for your life,” he advised.

  “Can we go up there?” I asked, pointing to the highest point on the lip of the crater. It was about three hundred feet above us.

  “If we hurry,” said the sergeant.

  We hustled right up there past at least three seismic stations of the type we’d seen on Chimborazo. I was tempted to jump up and down over the buried geophones. See if I could force the evacuation of Quito, a town of more than one million souls.

  “But that would be wrong,” Rob Howard advised me gravely.

  Presently, we reached the summit, where a plaque said we were standing at 4,781 meters (15,686 feet). The eruption had subsided and I could see down into the crater, which looked like a great ashy basin studded with various gray hillocks. The volcano, we had been told, was “building domes,” six of them to date, and we could see them down there, piles of whiter rock pushed up out of the earth like so many pimples.

  The crater wall was not perfectly formed, but fell away sharply to the west in the way a river cuts a wide canyon out of a rock wall. We were standing on the highest spot, which was to the east. From the air, the entire crater must have looked rather like a cup tipped precipitously to the west.

  Quito lies to the east, protected by the high wall of the crater, and by another mountain, Ruku, which is actually part of Pinchincha, a volcanic peak that is, for the residents of Quito, blessedly inactive. What all this meant was that if Pinchincha really blew, Quito would be largely protected. The brunt of the explosion would be directed off to the mostly uninhabited west.

  (This is characteristic of eruptive volcanoes. When Mount St. Helens blew, in May 1980, nearby Portland was not much affected, but in Montana, where I live, almost seven hundred miles away, martial law was declared for a day due to heavy ashfall.)

  From the summit, it was also possible to see the drainage patterns, and they all fell off to the west as well. That meant that rivers of lava would be directed away from the city. Pyroclastic flows also follow drainage patterns. These are great, heavy clouds of pulverized, incandescent rocks, vapor, and poisonous gases that can pour down drainages at over one hundred miles an hour. Some experts believe that this is probably what happened at Pompeii, under Mount Vesuvius, when it blew in A.D. 79. The people were killed by pyroclastic flows, then buried in ash.

  But Quito was essentially safe. In a big eruption, a stiff wind might carry heavy ash over the city, and a number of buildings could collapse. If the ash was hot enough, there could be fires. But it wouldn’t be Pompeii, or anything like it.

  As I was contemplating the fate of Quito, a low, ominous rumbling rose up out of the crater, getting louder and louder. The receiver Yvan carried began making that waffling, weaving sound.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Sergeant Baez.

  “Avalanche, I think,” he said. Either the west wall of the crater was further eroding, or one of the domes was pushing up a little higher. The rumbling sounded like a jet plane taking off, and the institute called up to Yvan and suggested we evacuate the area in an orderly manner.

  The roaring reverberated off the crater walls, but it stopped after a minute or so. As we scrambled down from the summit, another salmon-colored cloud billowed up out of the crater and painted the entire sky pink, the color of pulverized, incandescent rock.

  When we reached the refuge, cooling gray ash fell like a light snow all around. Marcel, of 911, piled everyone into his truck, and we evacuated the area like so many bats out of hell.

  Which was all just as well, since Rob and I had to drive back lickety-split down the Pan American Highway in order to be in Baños the next day for the people’s five-hour visit. It would be a symbolic homecoming to a town that was well and truly menaced by an erupting volcano.

  The next day’s newspapers all had front-page pictures of the eruption of Pinchincha. There had been two of them. The first, at six-forty in the morning, we saw. It produced an ash cloud that rose to three kilometers and was powerful enough, so said the newspaper Hoy, that the mayor of Quito, Roque Sebilla, saw fit that morning to declare a combination orange and yellow alert. There were four stages of alert: white was “inform yourself and report unusual volcanic activity”; yellow was “maintain alert”; orange was “prepare to evacuate”; while red meant “run for your life.” Actually, the word was “evacuate.”

  So the oddly silent eruption we’d seen yesterday morning had prompted the mayor to suggest that the people of Quito might begin thinking about evacuation. There had been another and much more powerful eruption later that day, just as the scientists at the Institute of Geophysics had predicted. The newspaper El Comercio said, “The second eruption was very big and produced a column of ashes and gas higher than ten kilometers.”

  This gave me a great deal of confidence in the expertise of the people of the institute, but did not much settle my mind, because we were about to go into Baños, a town those same scientists thought severely threatened. They’d sent a letter to government officials to that effect in mid-October, and a day later, the people of Baños were given a single day to evacuate. Red alert. Immediately afterward, the military had formed lines around the city to prevent the possibility of looting.

  But now, many of the evacuees would be going back to their town for the first time in almost two months. They were all packed inside buses, twenty-two of them, waiting for the military convoy to take them down the road to Baños, where the Amazon jungle meets the mountains.

  We were waiting for the buses at the military checkpoint where we’d been stopped on our first attempt to visit Baños. Sergeant Aedo, whom we’d met at the Geophysical Observatory near Pelileo, was along to help. He’d been living in the military tent for two months, working with Patty Mothes some of the time, and had come to understand a little about volcanoes.

  Yesterday, while we were on Pinchincha, he’d been about six thousand feet up on the slopes of Tungurahua, helping Patty place GPS devices used to measure the bulging of the earth. “The ground,” he said, “was trembling under my feet.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Of course I was scared,” Sergeant Aedo said sensibly.

  In the weeks he’d been stationed at the observatory, the sergeant had closely monitored the four old-fashioned seismographs set up under one of the taped-over windows. When the little arm started drawing big peaks and valleys on the revolving drum, something always happened, and not much later. An explosion sounded like a mortar going off two feet away, and it wasn’t a good idea to be standing near a window at that time.

  We couldn’t see Tungurahua from the checkpoint, but we could hear it. There was a faint rumbling, like the one at Pinchincha, and it sounded, once again, like a jet plane not so very far away. The avalanches continued for over thirty seconds. And then, in the sudden silence, there came the sound of honking horns and shouting, happy voices. The convoy of buses was moving slowly down the road. People were hanging out of the windows and sitting on the top of the buses, all of them waving little white flags and shouting, “Long live Baños.”

  Military vehicles led the convoy and patrolled along the sides. Sergeant Aedo talked Rob and me onto one of the buses and we were off to Baños, amid a crowd of happy, singing people. I sat next to Daniel, twenty-four, a tourist guide specializing in climbing and rafting. “Our city,” he said, “waits for us.”

  There was a large banner hanging down behind the driver of the bus that said, “I live and shall always live in Baños.” The bus’s public address system was playing a cassette of songs about Baños. The songs said, “Baños is the paradise of the mountains,” and “In Baños life is beautiful,” and “I live and shall always live in Baños.”

  People sang along with the songs and waved their small white flags, most of which were emblazoned with words that echoed the songs, though some seemed to refer to this or that little bit of corruption: “Of the 10,000 American d
ollars, not 1,000 has arrived.”

  We emerged from a canyon, and I could see Baños far below, spread out on a flat bench of land just above a river. Across that river, rising abruptly, were the steep slopes of Tungurahua. It was spitting out a steady stream of black ash that combined with the clouds in the sky, and the clouds hung over the pretty city of Baños, black and heavy bellied.

  Ominously, I could also see the crater, and it was tipped off in one direction, like the one on Pinchincha. Except that on Tungurahua, the crater tipped in the direction of Baños, which was basically situated at the foot of the mountain. All the drainages led directly down into the town. In a major eruption, pyroclastic flows would hit Baños in minutes. The lava would follow.

  We stopped at a bridge as several soldiers uncoiled the razor wire strung across the span and continued on into the abandoned city. There was some graceful colonial architecture, and almost none of the buildings was over three stories high. Flowers grew wild everywhere, and parrots shrieked in the trees. It was a place, as the song said, where the jungle met the mountains, and one of the loveliest little towns I’d ever seen.

  So it was more than strange to see such a place with no one on the streets, no one in the houses, no one anywhere. All the businesses along the empty streets—the Baños pharmacy, the travel agencies, the restaurants, the hotels—all of them were locked and shuttered. Black, ash-filled clouds hung over the ghost town of Baños.

  The buses parked in front of the great Basilica of Baños, an imposing gray building entirely constructed of stones from the nearby mountains. People stood in the square in front of the church, laughing and singing and embracing one another, as lines of soldiers stood across every side street in an attempt to funnel people into the Basilica to hear the Mass.

  Inside, a stern, gaunt-looking man stood at a lectern just under the altar and sang. He had an emotional, soaring voice, and his song opened up the floodgates so that most of the people standing in the pews wept openly. Behind him, a phalanx of women were placing flowers on the altar. A statue of the Virgin, holding the baby Jesus, was carried in on a pallet and placed high to the left of the altar.

  All along the side walls of the Basilica, there were large oil paintings, all about ten feet wide by six high. I studied one of them, while an elderly priest chanted a prayer to the Virgin. The painting showed Tungurahua erupting, spitting fire, with clouds of smoke and ash above. The river was pink with the reflection of the fire in the sky. Below, there were two or three huts, and what appeared to be a church. Several men—farmers as well as businessmen in suits—were carrying a statue of the Virgin and the baby Jesus out of the church. In the distance, people were running for their lives along a dirt path. The runners were depicted comically, with their legs spread too far apart, their arms stretched out in front of them, and their hats flying off their heads as in a cartoon.

  Underneath, there was a great deal of writing, painted by hand. It said that the people of Baños had always protected the Virgin during eruptions of Tungurahua. It said that in the year 1797, on February 4, Tungurahua erupted violently but Baños was spared major damage, while towns farther from the mountain were all but destroyed. There were other, even more miraculous events depicted. Baños had never been utterly destroyed by an eruption of Tungurahua. Baños always protected the Virgin.

  “Mary, Queen of heaven,” chanted the priest.

  “Queen,” chanted the people.

  “Mary, Queen of the earth.”

  “Queen.”

  “Mary, Queen of all the saints.”

  “Queen.”

  Presently, several men—some probably farmers, some probably businessmen—lifted up the statue of the Virgin and led the congregation out into the streets. The procession moved over the cobbled streets and through the locked and shuttered city.

  People walked shoulder to shoulder, well over two thousand of them, and they filled the street from sidewalk to sidewalk for a distance of over two blocks. In some of the buildings, behind the taped-over windows, we saw starving cats. People who’d brought sandwiches tried to shove pieces of bread under the doors, or through cracks in windows broken by booming eruptions. The cats mewled piteously and some people were infuriated—with the owners of the animals or the evacuation order or both—and the mood on the street began slowly to turn sour.

  I stood on a grassy hill to take a few notes, and a man who looked remarkably like the actor Charles Bronson asked me if I was a journalist. I admitted that I was, and he said I should tell the world that the politicians of Ecuador didn’t care about the people. They were thieves. “If corruption was a sport,” he said, “the politicians of this country would be world champions.” There was no danger from Tungurahua, he said. All the stories in the paper, the evacuation of Baños: it was all just a way to shift the public spotlight off corruption.

  “You don’t think there is any danger?”

  “None at all,” the man said. In fact, he had some clothes and food in the day pack he carried and he was going to elude the police and the military. He’d stay in Baños.

  “Are there others who are going to stay?”

  “Many, I think,” the man said.

  In the distance, the procession was approaching the police line, and it appeared that the men carrying the Virgin were not going to stop. The police, not ready to use riot batons on Virgin-carrying citizens, retreated up one block, then another. As the police moved their lines, several dozen people broke out of the crowd and ran up a wooded hillside, easily outdistancing the pursuing police, who carried large plastic riot shields.

  The clouds, heavy with suspended particles of ash, hung low over the city. Slender shafts of light fell on the square as the Virgin was brought back to the Basilica. It had turned cold and windy. In the empty side streets, behind the military and police lines, the wind picked up piles of black ash and sent them spinning about in shadowy whirlwinds. The ash stung my eyes, and I tasted the grit on my tongue.

  Police moved down the back streets behind straining dogs. People were moving reluctantly toward the buses, pursued by the dogs in a kind of bitter slow motion. I felt a drop of rain, and then several. Finally the sky opened up and the rain fell hard, rattling the leaves of the trees lining the square.

  The people of Baños, some of them crying again, began boarding their buses. They were ready to face armed soldiers and vicious attack dogs, but they didn’t seem to want to get wet. Once again, I sat next to Daniel, the guide. He looked out into the rain and said: “Our city cries for us.”

  The Entranced Duck

  I recall strolling through a Balinese temple with my younger brother, Nyoman Wirata. An important religious ceremony was about to begin, and it was likely that several of the men would fall into trances. We expected to see some socially acceptable and highly controlled violence later as priests and handlers, using blessed water, attempted to wake the men from their religious ecstasy. I had noticed that it was usually the village headman who got bloodied in the end-trance rumpus, and was working on an idea about trancing behavior.

  “Older brother,” Nyoman said. I was fifteen years older, and Nyoman had begun calling me “older brother,” beli, some weeks previous. “Beli, look. There is your wife.”

  I turned to see a Western woman, improperly dressed for the ceremony. She was, in fact, wearing short shorts, revealing a sunburned pair of thighs. In contrast to the lithe and graceful Balinese women all about, the woman, an American, I feared, strode about as if stomping large, poisonous spiders with every step. The concept of respect was alien to her.

  She stood in front of one of the altars and was examining the offerings: two ten-foot-high pyramids of brightly colored fruit placed on either side of a pig’s head. There were a dozen sticks protruding from the head, and strung between the sticks was delicate white lace, like the finest embroidery. The lace was made of pig fat.

  “Eeeyew,” the woman said loudly, “gross!” Damn: an American.

  “That is not my wife, little
brother,” I said to Nyoman. “That is your wife.”

  “No, big brother. I will marry Ketut in six months. You do not have a wife. Go talk to your wife. Be Sangyang bebec and she will love you.”

  “I can’t do the entranced duck in a temple, Nyoman.”

  “In Bali, it is proper to laugh,” Nyoman said, and he nudged me toward the woman, giggling.

  I was staying in Nyoman’s family compound, in the mountain town of Ubud, and my back window looked out on a green rice paddy. During the days, Nyoman drove me to various ceremonies in a car I had rented. Many of the remote villages we visited did not have electricity or running water.

  In the Hindu-Agama religious ceremonies we sought out and witnessed, a man, self-selected, breathes the smoke of scented wood, then falls into a rapturous ecstasy, during which time he becomes, for instance, a pig. It is called “going Sangyang.” The supernaturally controlled pig crawls about on all fours, grunts convincingly, eats garbage, and rolls in the mud in front of the entire village. Sometimes, an entranced man will become a monkey and climb trees with startling, simian strength. Sangyang Djarum is the most spectacular of the trancing ceremonies, and the one most often performed for tourists. A man riding a tree branch, as a child will ride a hobby horse, runs through a rather large fire, barefoot. The fire is scattered and systematically stomped out.

  In the most violent of the ceremonies, entranced men fight with sticks or swords, and yet no one is injured. At the conclusion of the event, a gang of village men, directed by a priest, or permangku, sprinkle blessed water on the foreheads of those who have gone Sangyang. As the men swim up out of the trance, they seem almost stunned, and there is a dazed, drunken expression in their eyes. They sometimes swing fists or throw elbows. Often, half a dozen men have to subdue a particularly fractious trancer. The man is tackled and held on the ground until he fully emerges from the trance. And it is almost always the headman who steps away from the pile with a bloody nose.