Hold the Enlightenment (19 page)

Indeed, when Alexander von Humboldt passed through Ecuador in 1802, he called the path that would become the Pan American Highway the Avenue of the Volcanoes: there was, for instance, Pinchincha, looming over the old colonial city of Quito; Cotopaxi, near Latacunga; Chimborazo, west of Ambato; and Tungurahua near Baños, not to mention a plethora of others, most of them visible to one another from the summit of one or the other trembling mountain, given a rare, clear day.

Currently, the two most obstreperous of the mountains—Pinchincha and Tungurahua—were vomiting up gas and ash and lava simultaneously. They were both on a vague schedule: Pinchincha became active every three hundred years or so, while Tungurahua erupted about once a century, so it was inevitable, in the fullness of time, that the two would become active at about the same time.

In fact, the Quechua-speaking indigenous population—various groups of Indians with remarkably varied cultures—were in agreement on one thing: when Guagua
(baby)
Pinchincha cries, Mama Tungurahua wakes up, and Daddy Cotopaxi roars. As yet, snowcapped Cotopaxi—at 19,374, it was the world’s highest active volcano—was still dozing fitfully. It rose just north of us, obscured now in the rain that was falling in biblical torrents.

Luis and Monica said that if we were interested, they could show us a road around the barricades. It was the way of things in Ecuador: someone always knows a way around the obstacle. And so the people who had been blocking our way ten minutes ago got in the backseat of the car and directed us back the way we had come. We were stopped by a line of police wearing gray camouflage
gear, which stood out starkly against the grassy green hillsides.

“Did you come through from the south?” a sergeant asked.

“No, we turned around.”

“So the demonstration continues.”

Luis said, “Yes, señor. We continue to block the Pan American.”

The sergeant nodded, and all but saluted Luis.

The police, it seemed, were determined not to be provocative. They had established their lines out of sight of the demonstration, and were just waiting for it to be over, like the truck drivers, except that the police had to stand out in the rain. My impression was that the cops sympathized with the demonstrators and that Jamil Mahuad wasn’t long for the office of the president.

(Indeed, several weeks after I left Ecuador, Mahuad fled the presidential palace after a chaotic but bloodless military/civilian uprising. A junta—composed of a military chief, a former Supreme Court justice, and an indigenous leader—declared they were in control of the government. Several hours later—after discussing matters of foreign aid and investment with representatives of the U.S. government—the junta declared itself dissolved, and returned power to the constitutionally elected government. Sort of. Vice President Gustavo Noboa assumed power.)

At the time, however, there along the Pan American Highway, amid the dead dogs and burning tires, I was watching the rumblings of what would very soon become a coup, and the words “powder” and “keg” kept clanging together in my mind.

Luis and Monica were pleased to help us around the barricades they themselves had erected. We were directed down a series of gravel roads that eventually led directly through the town of Latacunga. They said they did not blame the United States for the troubles in Ecuador, an attitude I’ve rarely encountered among South American intellectuals.

“You have good government,” they said, “while ours is bad and very corrupt.”

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.”

“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.”