Indesicion

I just finished Benjamin Kunkel’s smart and irreverent novel, ‘Indecision.’ My father brought the book all the way from Lake Placid, New York, still taped up in its Amazon.com cardboard box. Yes, I ordered it online, because some website told me it was one of the top reads on Latin America rightthisminute.

Oh, well. The book wasn’t really about Latin America, unless you count a white, 20-something dude’s stumblings through the Ecuadorian jungle, but the book drew me in nevertheless and surprised me at the end. I have to say I recommend it, even though this guy, this protagonist I suspect is modeled on Kunkel himself, is everything I roll my eyes at. The narrator, named Dwight of all things, is this kind of lazy IT rep who rolls into work each morning at 10 AM, golfs and drinks with his father on weekends, hits on his sister, and bats girlfriends around like they’re whiffleballs. I shook my head all the way to the end, when Dwight whips out a memoir in about two weeks and now it’s in my hands and the NYTimes loved it.

Still, for how obnoxious the guy sometimes was, he was freaking clever, too. The way he describes his trip to Ecuador is pretty hilarious, and he invents some darn funny words.

Anyway, decide for yourselves, dear readers! Meanwhile, an excerpt that spoke to me:

Meanwhile I let myself hope that to publish this memoir on the growth of my mind may bring these issues more notice than our press releases attract. But I don´t mean to bring you down as a reader, and one main effort of my life is to try not to spoil my own mood. Currently the party line I give myself, and do in part believe, is that what´s happiest is just to be alive and sensitive when it comes to feeling the world, and if what your senses, honed beyond usefulness, end up registering is so much suffering out there that you become light-headed with it at times - well, those senses can be used for words on a page, a loved mammal in your arms, music (including sad kinds, and anyway this is only the tip of a list anyone could assemble. I know my list is basic but maybe to utter banalities is a type of solidarity in these lonelifying times?

The Land of Eternal Youth

I meet Isaac on the bus from Loja to Vilcabamba, the day before yesterday. He was on the five-hour ride from Cuenca to Loja, too, but we left so early that everyone dozed for the first half of the ride, and watched the featured film, ‘Big Momma,’ for the second half. Still, I eyed Isaac, wondering where he was from, guessing that he was American when he pulled out a thick book with reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle on the back. I didn’t catch the title—he read it for only a moment before tipping his head back and closing his eyes. And so I watched ‘Big Momma’ in Spanish, and I was glad that for once they weren’t playing some gory Italian film, which always fills the bus with sounds of shooting and crying.

Isaac sees me take out my Lonely Planet while we wait for the Vilcabamba bus to leave. The thing weighs a ton, and hasn’t helped me much; still, it's something to look at. Vilcabamba is famous for its residents who just don’t seem to kick the bucket, I read, and then I hear Isaac’s voice. “If you have any questions about Vilcabamba, let me know,” he is saying, leaning across his seat to talk to me. The two young women behind us, both with low-cut shirts and babies on their laps, watch us attentively. “I lived there for a year,” he adds.

Isaac has curly curly hair and wears glasses; definitley Jewish, I remember thinking, maybe unfairly, but turns out he is. I tell him I’d love a hotel recommendation; Isaac knows plenty. As the bus pulls out of the station, I move to the seat beside him, and for the whole ride we talk. He’s a talker. He tells me he taught English in this valley for a year, and it’s been four since he’s returned. He can’t wait, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He points out the little towns that, for some reason, never got famous like Vilcabamba did, even though, he says, they’re just as beautiful. He points out the village with the pretty blue church, and the valley that’s sprung up with houses since he was last hear. And as we reach our destination, he claps his hands. “I love it here,” he admits, unnecessarily.

The hostel Isaac recommends is superb, the cottages designed around a garden. “Anything grows here,” he tells me, and this hostel makes that obvious. They’ve got vegetables, clover instead of grass, and vines of golden trumpets climbing the clay walls. The short Ecuadorian man who answers the door shows me a room with whitewashed walls and a high, angled ceiling, two beds with thick mattresses. “Eleven dollars per night,” he tells me when I ask the price. And then he hastens to add: “including breakfast.”

The Mexican restaurant Isaac tells me to visit is also excellent. I am starving. “I haven’t eaten in days,” I tell Isaac. I admit that the week has been a rough one: a dead man, a car chase, and a bumpy ride out of my relationship stole my appetite. The waitress at the Mexican place serves me sliced chicken, big brown beans, warm tortillas, and a pile of guacamole. That dish, and a cup of strong coffee, cost four dollars. As I sit out on the restaurant’s patio, I watch Isaac climb into a pickup, the vehicle owned by his host father from four years ago. And as he drives out of the main square, perched in the truck’s bed, he catches my eye and flashes a peace sign.

*

Isaac calls me to hike the next morning. He’s got a few spare hours before he needs to meet another family he lived with, and so we meet at a tiny tienda up the hill from my hostel and walk down the paved road that quickly turns to dirt. This landscape is incredible; the frequent, steep hills form jungled valleys, and a river runs along the road. We pass a house with animal skins tacked to the outside walls; we pass a group of men laying cement for a new house. Isaac notes that many homes have gone up since he was last here. “The gringos love this place,” he says. “For twenty thousand, they can buy a nice piece of land, and for another fifty, they can build their dream house.” He points to the line of homes with red roofs that have gone up on the adjacent hill. Stone gates keep intruders out.

He tells me about the hippies, too, the way they flock from the States and Argentina and Europe to buy up land where they can grow whatever they want. “It’s easy to live off the map,” Isaac says. “But there are a lot of crazies out here, guys who come and live as hermits, or go into the town square to get drunk every day before lunch.” Still, he loves the place; every man who passes us, Isaac knows. His Spanish is still good after four years in Berkeley, and he chats with men who carry machetes strapped to their hips and wear dusty rubber boots. “Sorry,” he apologizes after each eager, lengthy conversation, but I know he really isn’t. He beams.

We climb up out of the valley and traverse the ridge, and you can see that the hills around us have been stripped bare long ago. We can look down to where the river divides the land and see that houses have sprung up, and fresh roads. “Those weren’t there before,” Isaac says many times. He talks steadily as we walk, keeping me entertained, stopping periodically to look around, his hand shading his eyes. “God,” he keeps saying. “Vilcabamba.” We pass an old man with a long, white beard and round spectacles, and his wizened, gray-haired, feisty-looking wife. They’re hiking to visit a friend, they tell us in Spanish, even though their accents beneath are American. We pass a hippie girl with rosaries around her neck and no bra who asks us about the purple flowers we keep passing. We pass two men who are cutting the brush on the sides of the hill with machetes—food for the cows, Isaac says. He cheerily greets them: “How’s it going?” He asks. “Working,” the men grumble, without looking up.

We never end up finding the waterfall Isaac was sure existed down in one of the valleys, but we stumble along the rocky river, stopping once to sit and eat cookies. We get lost, but not very, and eventually clouds come and fill the blue, blue sky. We pass a tree with wide, flat leaves the colors of white stones; “They look like mirrors from far away,” Isaac says. We see birds—little yellow ones, iridescent blue ones, once a toucan sitting perfectly still in a tree, its beak long and curved. It doesn’t stir when we call to it, clap at it, and I wonder aloud whether it’s sleeping. On our walk back towards the village, we pass the same men, hacking at the hillside brush. An orange-brown mutt sits perched above them, looking down, and this time Isaac doesn’t say a word.

*

You can see why the hippies come. You can see why the old people hold on to their years, and why these little hotels spring up and fill every season. In Cuenca, it rained, and Loja was gray, but nestled in this valley, Vilcabamba boasts an eternal summer. I didn’t imagine rain, hot as the afternoon was, the sun beating down without making shadows, but this afternoon clouds came and spilled over us and then broke open and it poured. The smell of the earth rose up right away as the rain gained strength and then turned to chips of hail. But even as the sky above me darkened, blue sky clung on in the distance. The rain is still falling now, cooling the air and bringing to life all the plants around here that today’s sun dried. And yet the clouds are softening, lightening, and I know that in a moment they’ll turn pink. I’ll sleep one more night in my soft Vilcabamba bed, where outside my window emerald clover grows thick. And then someone else will come, and sleep in this bed, and walk the Vilcabamba mountains to be amazed.

Cuenca

For Carlos

Carlos was right about Cuenca. You’ll find what you need there, he told me, when I complained to him about how stagnant I felt in Quito. I’m not writing anything, I told him, anything good, anyway, and he told me, just wait. Wait for the river at nighttime, the glittering lights that run all up and down it. Wait for the hippies, with their jewelry on the steps that lead to the river; wait for the flowers that twist around buildings. A smile played on Carlos’ lips as he sipped his wine and looked out on the gray clouds that lay over Quito’s ugly apartment buildings. You’ll love it there, he said, and closed his eyes.

But I didn’t expect to, not after these last few weeks. I didn’t expect to be able to see past my own two hands, past the tears I figured I’d always find in my eyes, past the loneliness that I’d prepared myself to withstand. I’d be lying if I said that June hasn’t chipped away at my heart. My relationship shifted overnight, it seemed like, then slid out beneath me altogether, and meanwhile I flew back and forth to New Mexico for a wedding in the course of five days. I visited a Target megastore there, and a little stand of cottonwoods, and the tops of the Sandia Mountains. It was all just so much, you know? Then: a midnight arrival in Quito, a ten-hour night bus to Cuenca, and I discover, gradually, that freedom can bring you to life. I ride across countries, over water, and no one knows my name. It can be so sweet, you know? Being alone.

And here, here, in this beautiful city that Carlos loved, I let the air fill me. The ornate buildings, the cobblestone streets, the huge, white churches lift me up. I make sure that the conversations I have with other lone travelers, or the man who owns this hotel, or the friend I call late in the evening, are enough. And in the spaces without words, without my laptop and a cup of coffee in a churchside café (it’s just the one Carlos predicted I’d find), I stroll up and down the streets beneath a constantly shifting sky.

I didn’t expect it, but I find, in this city, my favorite place so far. I find a place I think I could live, a place to which I know I’ll return. I find four-story buildings with delicate molding built on the sides of steep hills, and I find the muddy river, churning and grass-lined and lit up at night. I find little cobblestone paths that lead to crumbling galleries, and everywhere there are the churches, this one blue, this one white, the one at the top of the hill a rich gold. I find a bakery-tienda crammed with raisin-rolls and stacked bottles of ginger ale and the scent of cheese empanadas. The owners live upstairs and look down at me by glancing up at the mirror they’ve tacked to the ceiling. I find, one day, a dead man on the street, the rain soaking him, and then they take him away and the sun comes out and the city turns and continues. That day, I feel the most grateful, the richest in my freedom and family both.

This week is Septenario, a seven-day festival to mark the solstice. Like so many festivals down here, it’s a blend of indigenous and Catholic history both, and each morning, families arrive with trucks full of two dozen kinds of sweets. Cookies, chocolate marshmallows, biscotti, jelly candy; they set it all up in piles beneath white tents that surround the churches. They will do this each day until Septenario ends, and in the nighttime you can hear sporadic fireworks until morning.

*

I wait in the park, alone. No book, no friend, no phone—just the clouds that darken one half of the sky. I watch the tiles on the roof of the whitewashed building in front of me: some are amber, some are copper, some are dusted with yellow, and some are bleached white. The tiled roof sits beneath the blue half of the sky, and I think that I’ll remember these clear colors forever. I let Cuenca soothe me, let the steady murmur of it loosen my mind, let the river that leads to the mountains and the fruit for sale on the sidewalk remind me of my exquisite freedom. My thoughts run rich beneath the half-and-half sky, and I don’t feel like crying here, after all.

Carlos:

Esta historia está dedicada a ti, y yo quisiera traducirlo, pero ahora no puedo. Quizás mas tarde hoy, o mañana, pero probablemente tu no vas a ver esta historia en español hasta yo publico mi libro y después traduzcolo en español. Entonces, quizás puedes entender un poquito…y si no, hasta ny, cuando podremos hablarnos en ingles. Gracias por tu consejo…tenias razon...Cuenca, me encanta. No quiero salir; quisiera regresar y comprar una casa, tal vez...un día, y hasta entonces volveré a Cuenca en mi mente.

Discúlpame por mi español. Todavia es tan mala...te extraño; necesito mi amigo ecuatoriano, para practicar español…y tantas cosas mas. Espero que todo este bien con tu familia, tu vida en Venezuela…gracias por todo, mi amigo. Un beso…Katy 

Baños

I get to Baños in the evening; by then, clouds have already wrapped themselves between the mountains, around the church steeple, and over the river. Mist winds down the streets as a party bus, lights flashing, drives slowly along. Smoke from the line of grills set up outside the cathedral wafts up to my second-floor hotel room, which shares a balcony with the adjacent rooms. As the sun sets, the church is illuminated by blue lights which glow eerily through the mist. The ride from Quito to Baños takes four hours.

The clouds haven't lifted when I wake up the next morning. I pull the curtains open and see that the window has fogged and raindrops fleck the panes; I still cannot see the mountains. I boil water for coffee in the tiny kitchen on the roofdeck and wait as the other guests wake up and come upstairs to make breakfast, wait as the rain slows from a pour to a drizzle, wait until I can finally see these towering, fabled hills.

All of the trails are safe, the man at the hostel tells me quickly while he does a dozen other things: passes towels to waiting tourists, checks girls with huge backpacks out of their rooms, sips a cup of black coffee from a white mug. He wants me to get out of the way. Just take care, he tells me, and then looks away. I leave the hostel and walk down the one-lane streets until I come to the bridge, which crosses a deep gorge that divides the town from the eastern hills. The sky is brightening, the clouds are melting, and below me, hundreds of feet down, brown water in the river churns.

The road grows more and more broken the higher I go; first it’s one wide, tiled lane, but then those bricks crumble and it becomes a rocky, bumpy path that pickups jerk and bump down. In the back of each truck people stand, clinging to makeshift bars, and watch me. Dogs run to the side when they hear the cars, but don’t look at me as we pass each other. I can hear them barking in the hills, above and below me, unseen. A copper-colored horse stands in the grass, gazing at me through long lashes, her blonde mane blowing in the breeze. Always there are dogs, sitting on the side of the road, or trotting along as if they’re on a mission, their noses raised and sniffing the wind.

Higher and higher I go. Fewer cars are passing me now, and the breeze smells of eucalyptus, of juniper, of cut grass, of cow manure. Occasionally a sweet smell like jasmine cuts across my path, or the scent of lilies, which now, as they always have, take me back to my cousin Liza’s apartment in Rome so many years ago. She kept lilies in wine bottles there. The sky lightens and darkens, clouds passing over me, always fading and returning both. How green it is here, how lush the thick grass seems, and how dark the thick leaves of the trees. Now I pass pine; now I pass grazing cows. I hear a rustle in the bush beside me; chickens are clucking, scratching, glaring at me. Water pours out of a pipe that protrudes from the hillside.

I pass a family eating their breakfast. Their house is a wooden lean-to with a clear tarp for a roof, and it’s built on the hill, right next to the road. I wonder how many times the rain has taken it down; you can see evidence of mudslides everywhere on these inclines. The family doesn’t notice me; they sit on plastic chairs drinking soup while the mother fries plantains on a tiny grill. There must be six of them sitting there, half-sheltered by the flimsy tarp roof.

I walk and walk, and it gets harder and harder to breathe. Still, it’s so beautiful here, with the expanse of green peaks and the volcano in the distance, that I don’t want to stop. I go up and up, past steep stands of tree tomatoes, the fruit hanging like suspended red eggs from the branches. I pass an abandoned pickup, a donkey tied to a tree, an abandoned wooden hut painted over with grafitti, and always these mountains, so green and cut with waterfalls, with herd paths, with the track marks of old rockslides. How clean the wind is here, and how constant.

I pass a woman who carries costals in both hands. Buenas dias, I tell her, and she grunts and nods. I look back after a few steps; she has stopped and is staring at me, and when she catches me looking she glances away. The road cuts back and forth across the hill, and when I look down again, I see that she is still watching with narrowed eyes. I hurry on.

On the way back down towards the village, I pass a parked red truck, the bass audible from the speakers. Hola, I tell the man who sits in the driver’s seat. Come here, he says, not unkindly. There’s a child sitting next to him, fiddling with the rearview, and so I step closer. Where are you from? the man asks me. I tell him. A beautiful country, he tells me. Beautiful, like you. I mutter a thank-you. And where is your husband? He asks. I tell him I don’t have one. He pulls out his cell phone and starts scrolling through his contacts. I have many nice friends, he tells me. Would you like to meet them? I shake my head and lean in, towards the little boy. And how old are you? I ask him. He holds up three fingers, then four. Four! I say. You look older. The man looks me up and down, and tells me again how beautiful I am. I wonder whether he is drunk. Good bye, I tell them both, and hurry along, leaving the red truck with its thumping bass behind.

Towards the bottom of the mountain, I hear someone running behind me. I turn around; it’s a young boy in a blue t-shirt and jeans. He runs past without saying anything, and I watch him as he makes his quick way down the steep, rocky road. Just as he’s about to turn the bend, he raises his arms up beside him and jumps, and for one moment I imagine that this mountain wind will lift him, and he'll fly.

Photitos

Behold, the niños of San Roque. Today was my last day for a couple of my classes, and to commemorate the occasion we took an abundance of photos. In addition, I was gifted many lovely things: a hand-knit hat, a hand-knit purse, a pen with a spiky green duck at the end, a bag of Ruffles, a container of some candy that comes in a little cup. Would Ivan Illich hate me for what I've done? Maybe so.

In any case, it is what it is. Good bye, San Roque! Thank you for a humbling and lovely time of it. 

Conversation from last night:

Eloesa: I want to see a picture of you with the kids! You'll look so tall and white!

Kate: Shut up.

Because it's true! That is just how I look. In real life the kids really aren't this tiny, it's just that Giant Kate is throwing off all proportions.

Passing through

            The man who cleans our house is washing the kitchen floor now. He’s scrubbed soapy water over the  boards and now he’s mopping in slow, circular motions. He never says much, but I saw him in the Patria park today, and he grinned at me. He looked different there, somehow. Buenas, I tell him as I’m leaving. He looks up from the wet floor and barely nods. Buenas, he replies. Once I made him a cup of coffee at lunchtime and left it for him on the kitchen table while he wiped down the bathroom sink. Outside, the sun is just starting to go down. It’s one of Quito’s most flattering lights, with the rays that fall between the mountains.

            There is the man who works at the Saborico tienda on the corner; today he is sitting behind the counter, his girlfriend on his lap. Both are on their cell phones. There are the junkies who lean against the graffiti outside and smoke cigarettes. They wear puffy down jackets and have thin faces and stringy hair, and they are talking loud as I pass them. There are the hippies who lay their necklaces on blankets on the sidewalk; there are their macramé necklaces, their silver cuffs set with stones they found in Nicaragua, maybe, or Peru. They sit, cross-legged and barefoot, weaving their thread. Tom Miller, in his book ‘The Panama Hat Trail,’ recounts a conversation with Alejandro, a man he meets in the lively port city of Manta. “Why do they act the way they do?” Alejandro asks the narrator. “Their dirty long hair! Is it really true they’re from the families of the rich?”

            There are the two white-haired men in black suits who stumble, a little drunk, in front of me. The taller one has his arm around his friend’s shoulders, and as I pass them on the sidewalk one says, Buenas Dias, senorita. I walk past a little faster. Buenas, I mumble, knowing that if the guys were younger I wouldn’t say a word. Despite being drunk, age garners respect here. I hear one of them inhale sharply, and then ‘Que bonita,’ he murmurs, slow and clear. The other one cackles, and I want to laugh too. How smooth he managed to sound, and how young.

            Couples stroll past, or women in suits on their lunch breaks, or groups of guys in skinny jeans and black t-shirts and gel in their hair. I catch snippets of conversations: After I dropped her off at school…he paid eighty dollars for that? My friend Sam told me that, during her junior year abroad, she finally started to feel good about her French when she began understanding conversations she heard on the street. Maybe I am learning something, I muse. Here come two women in cardigans carrying canvas bags full of groceries; I asked her what she was going to do, I hear one say as we pass each other.

         There is the man I saw on my way back home from the school this morning. He's still sitting with his wife at the same outdoor table, in front of the Cafe Amazonas. They're still sharing a 40 ounce Pilsener, still smoking cigarettes from the pack of Marb lights on the table between them. They seemed so white, with their light hair and heavy bellies, but as I walk past them now I see that they've gotten sunburned. I wonder whether they've left the cafe all day. They lean back in their chairs without speaking, their eyes concealed by dark glasses, their cigarettes balanced over the ashtray.

        There is the woman I saw on my way to the bus this morning. She is still crouched against the corner of the Banco Central building, still selling nail clippers and combs and tubes of lipstick and lollipops, cigarettes and gum and unrefrigerated bottles of water. She has laid all of these things out in even rows on a blanket. She wears the typical black wraparound skirt of the indigenous, with the white blouse and navy shawl and folded cloth on her head. Around her neck, she's looped dozens of strands of tiny fake-gold beads, and she wears gold studs in her ears. Her wrinkles cut deep lines into her face, puckering her mouth and eyes. She doesn't glance up at me either time I pass.

            At the edge of the Patria Park, the shoe-shiner is shining the newspaper vendor’s shoes. They sit there in their respective seats, the shiner crouched and working efficiently, while they quarrel. A woman is selling sunglasses from a rack that must hold two hundred pairs. A man with slicked back hair in a gray suit eyes me unkindly as we cross the street. We run a little to make plenty of room for the bus, which careens towards us with the names of its many destinations plastered to its windshield. As it passes, I watch the ayudante – the driver’s helper – who stands in the open doorway, clinging to the bar with one hand as he flies past, his blue tie flapping, his mouth open and ready to shout.

   The man in front of me on the path through the Patria staggers along. There’s something wrong with his foot—it’s twisted inwards somehow—so he must lope unevenly, swinging the bad leg. He’s wearing dark green pants and an old brown t-shirt and he uses his arms to propel himself as he walks. In the grass, a man in a camouflaged army uniform sits with a young woman and a small child. The child stands, wobbles, sits back down, then stands again, and each time the man and woman laugh. Lovers tug at each other’s hands, kiss in the grass or against one of the park’s many sculptures, or shove and then embrace each other flirtatiously. Quito’s not Paris, but it’s a city of lovers, especially if you go to the park.

    The artists aren’t here today, the ones that line up their canvases on weekends and sunny days and then lean against their cars and smoke pipes and chat with each other, one eye always on their paintings. Most of the painters aren’t that good, and a few, to me, are brilliant.

Where dimensions mean little

In Tom Miller's non-fiction travelogue, 'The Panama Hat Trail,' the narrator documents his quest through Ecuador in search of the story of the famed Panama hat. Miller begins in Quito, conducting interviews with Panama hat distributors, then buses it across the country, up and down the coast, tracking down the straw beginnings of the hat.

Miller's descriptions of Ecuador are incredible. With travelogues written thirty years ago by privileged white men, I think that, at least for this writer, there will always come a distance, a revealed perspective that doesn't seem quite fair, a use of certain words that doesn't feel quite right. Still, Miller had his finger on the pulse. He's not afraid to tell it like it is, and to tell it beautifully. His writing is never hard, you know? He can blend grief with humor and make a poor place beautiful. Occasionally I wonder whether he's oversimplifying, but I read nearly each page with pleasure, savoring the prose, savoring the way I am transported.

The following passage was taken from Chapter Six of 'The Panama Hat Trail,' wherein the author has been walking all day with a few straw-cutters through tiny towns north of La Libertad. The sun is hot, and they're headed for the fields. The author is eager to see the Panama hat's very first beginnings, in the form of the unharvested straw. As they walk, Domingo, one of the cutters, tells the narrator that they'll reach the plantations soon. Miller writes:


Soon? What does soon mean to someone who walks barefoot three hours to work in the morning and back again at night? For all I knew he went home for lunch too. Soon? Distance and time are two of life's limitations that take on surreal questions in Latin America. Dimensions mean little. Soon? It could mean today, tonight, tomorrow, by next week, or I'm not sure. Soon could be fifteen minutes or fifteen miles. The difference between soon and forever might be negligible. A few minutes later Domingo added: "We're getting closer."

This View

Quito's Museum of Contemporary Art is located in a gorgeous white building above the La Basilica cathedral, near the city's historic center. From the park that surrounds the museum, you can see all of Quito, it feels like: the volcanoes on the horizon, and the way the city stretches so long. The museum itself was once a hospital, and you can tell. There are so many hallways, doorways, little rooms.

The museum's naturally lit interior and bright walls energize the brick foundation and those gleaming floors. The gallery leaves plenty of space between works - actually, I felt like display space was being wasted. Still, really gorgeous, and how nice to escape the city streets for this. The whole place breathes.

From the northern courtyard, La Basilica cathedral is visible. 

Amazing landscaping...

 

   

And the painting I loved the most. The artist's name is Daniel Manta Angeles, and the piece is called Constelación de Rosa. Angeles is one of three Peruvian artists featured at the museum right now; each share an attention to the primal, the organic and the ancestral. 

Lovely, right? With the red wall?

Wish you all were here...Love, Kate

Holiday

Today is May 24th, Pichincha Battle Day in Ecuador. The streets of Quito were quiet and the clouds didn't dominate...a lovely time. 

Back and forth, the woods.

There is something the same about every forest. This one, this jungle just outside of the tiny town of Mindo, is cool beneath its roof of gray clouds and wide banana-tree leaves. Though I am hearing sounds I’ve never heard—certain birdcalls, or the weight of some tropical leaf brushing the ground—it feels the same, in a way, as it always does. The trees shade the ground; the wind shifts. The cobwebs I pass through without seeing feel just the same way on my skin as they always have, invisible threads I can't fully brush off. These woods are churning; when I stop and stand still and listen, I don't hear a drop of silence, just the rustling, the branches breaking, the leaves on the ground brushing up against each other. God, when I am still, it's just so loud.

In every wood you can hear the lives, if you listen hard. Here, it's the constant shuffle of insects working and branches snapping and saplings growing. I am surrounded. It's the teeny mites that cling to the cuffs of my pants, mites that resemble chewed up leaves or prickly burrs and won't let go. It's the termites I can hear but not see in the dead logs I walk past, and it's the occasional urgent flapping, an unseen squabble in the branches. It's the thud I hear once, a distant and heavy sound like a coconut being chucked down from somewhere high. It's the sense that I'm being watched as I pass through someone's carefully marked-out territory, or step over someone's home.

It’s the palm frond I walk past that is waving. It’s moving steadily back and forth, back and forth, and maybe you'll tell me that it had to be the wind, but no other trees are moving this way. And yet there goes that metronome branch. I stop to stare at it, but I can’t get thick enough into the jungle to see what might be going on. I listen hard. Beneath the constant breaking of branches, crunching of leaves, calling of birds, there is a very faint gnawing, like someone is chewing that branch in zig-zag bites, working steadily to bring it down. A city, this forest, with a different language.

There's pine in the wind here, mixed with the smells of the rain and the dark, wet earth and the rotting trunks of dead trees. I inhale the pine and all the other things and I know that the town awaits: the Saturday shoppers, the restaurant-goers, the shouting candy vendors. But I don't have to go back there yet. The first time I smelled pine, something stayed with me forever, and now it finds me in these woods and takes me home.

Pretty Mindo

 

Mariposario

A mariposario is a butterfly house; mariposa is butterfly. Both are ubiquitous in beautiful, subtropical Mindo, where I spent the weekend. Mindo is this tiny town two hours southwest of here, set in the jungled mountains. To get from Mindo's teeny center to the mariposario, you walk down a dirt road, through meadows and past little mountains, until you come to this charming place with a hand-painted sign and tour buses parked out front. 

And thanks to Blogger's upgrade - executed not without tears shed and data lost - I can now enlarge my mariposa pictures with ease! May you all enjoy Patagonian Road's new and improved picture quality.

        

And.....holy *%(*!!!! I noticed this enormous thing, which I can only imagine is somehow the beginnings of a beautiful mariposa, hiding under a leaf, just looking at me. Que miedo!!!! I am terrified of all things wormlike. 

Ahhhhhh! I can't even bear to look at it. 

Taking this picture, in fact, was super difficult, but I did it for you all. 

Love, Kate