Hold the Enlightenment (20 page)

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 straight 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.

“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.