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T H I S+W E E K Mondo Weirdo:
Praise the Titanic!
> Above the volcano
D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
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Readers' Tips and Tales
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Tuesday, May 20 If it's Tuesday, A full list of all
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Climbing Mexico's newest landform offers unexpected lessons ROBERT RIDDELL | there is a volcano in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, that doesn't appear on maps made before 1943. The reason for this is straightforward enough: It wasn't there. On Feb. 20 of that year, a Purépecha Indian farmer working in his field noticed a mound of hot dirt that hadn't been there the day before. He wasn't particularly happy about it. Within a year, neither was the rest of his village, who had all been forced to flee what had rapidly grown into a full-fledged, rock- and ash-spewing geological event. For nine years, Paricutín -- named after the first settlement it buried -- grew and spewed, reaching 1,200 feet in height, covering 10 square miles of surrounding countryside with molten rock, snuffing out crops and forest life with a blanket of ash over an area 10 times that size. Then one day in 1952, it stopped. Geologically speaking, Paricutín is an instant landform. Climbing this thing was my friend Jennifer's idea. A damn good one too, but like many good ideas, its real origin was frivolous. To her credit, she admitted it from the start. She wanted to be able to utter the phrase "peer(ed) into its steaming maw" in conversation back home. (And who can blame her? It's a good one.) So early one morning we rolled into the tiny pueblo of Angahuán, 15 miles or so from our hotel in the city of Uruapan. We were immediately surrounded by Purépecha men eager to know if we were going to the volcano, and if we wanted to rent their horses. Some of the latter were in attendance, snorting in the cold morning air. Throughout the village, while we parked and bought oranges and candy bars from a sleepy old woman, loudspeakers blasted the monotone voice of a woman speaking a language entirely unrelated to Spanish. In a place where a large part of the citizenry neither understands Spanish nor reads their own language, this is apparently the best way to spread news and announcements. Made me feel like I'd left Mexico entirely. We bargained, settled and saddled up. Espiritu was our guide's name, and he was a gentle, solicitous man with dark skin and indígeno features. His Spanish, being a second language, was wonderfully clear and simple. Even the horses understood and obeyed him. Much as I tried to imitate his words and manner, my horse tended to park and munch on bits of the countryside whenever the mood struck her, which was quite often. So I tried to pretend that I was stopping her myself, the poor hungry thing, which worked pretty well. It's seven miles from Angahuán to the base of the volcano, most of it on a dirt road that meanders through farmland and avocado groves. When we turned off the road, the trail got steeper as the volcano, which had seemed impressively distant when we started, got closer and closer without appearing to get any more detailed. Erosion has yet to affect Paricutín, and it has no prominent vegetation to lend it character, to make it look like something other than a black, flattened mound of cinder. Its one visible feature is a strip of sand -- which I'm guessing indicates a former lava flow -- that runs vertically down its face and ends near a couple of trees where Espiritu tied our mounts once we arrived at the base. It was just about noon. Fortunately, a cloud cover had rolled in during the last few hours of our ride, for which we were grateful as we scrambled up the near-vertical talus slope, stopping for breath every few steps. Halfway up, I was startled to see a small, light-green pine sapling standing alone not far off the trail. In fact, from close up I could see that the slopes were dotted with tentative life. The caldera of Paricutín is an excellent place to contemplate the nature of volcanoes. This crater is a few hundred yards across and a hundred or so deep -- not overwhelmingly huge, but not bad for nine year's work either. I had to remind myself that everything I saw here, every rock and grain of sand, didn't exist when my parents were children. It wasn't so easy: The volcano is, after all, one of the oldest, most enduring forms on the planet. A dark cone of steaming rock and ash. Primordial earth, I half-remembered from my third-grade textbook, looked more or less like this, just with more trilobites. All along the rim, strips of wet ground gave off steam, which I thought lent the whole scene an air of seething unrest, and which made Jennifer happy. This was a steaming maw, no two ways about it, and we were indisputably peering into it. It was absolutely dead quiet up there, except for -- I swear I'm not making this up -- the squawking of a lone crow perched on a white cross at the highest part of the rim. Nothing spectacular was going on inside -- no bubbling lava, no hissing bottomless pit, just the inversion of the volcano's outer shape in the familiar talus slopes of rock and sand, with some lonely vegetation and more steam rising from scattered patches. "Inversion," in fact, is what I was thinking as I hiked alone along the rim of the crater. In some fundamental ways, volcanoes reverse the usual order of things, and this -- in addition to their gaudy violence -- must contribute to the awe with which they have always been regarded. A volcano such as Paricutín rises from the earth, growing in size and creating its own shape and substance in a world where mountains and rocks tend, however gradually, to shrink, erode, disintegrate. Whereas vegetation usually covers the land, a volcano creates new land and covers the vegetation. On Paricutín, dormant for 45 years so far -- and perhaps forever exhausted, like the half-dozen forested, flat-topped hills visible from its rim -- there is nonetheless a tangible reminder of its violent youth: Where the ground is hot, it is not from above, via absorbed sunlight, but from below. It is not mist condensed from cool air that shrouds this mountain, but steam rising from the depths of the earth. Our awed reverie was quickly and thoroughly dissipated by the descent. That vertical strip of sand proved to be an express lane right down to the horses and Espiritu, who had apparently been up to the crater enough times to be content waiting for us at the bottom. The only way to take it was at a run. Involuntary whoops filled the air as we descended in a minute or two what had taken us the better part of an hour to surmount. I rolled once but didn't miss a beat -- in fact, Jennifer said it looked like I gained speed. At the bottom, thighs aching, chest heaving, I emptied black sand and ash out of my shoes and pants and shirt and thought, what a fun volcano! I wish I had this in my backyard. Espiritu didn't seem to share our exhilaration. He took us on a short hike to ground zero of the Paricutín event, where Dionisio Pulido (the farmer had a name) had first noticed that fateful distention of earth, just a few feet away from the base of the present cone. The mound of rocks near where we stood was like an outdoor sauna. Espiritu told us the history of the volcano, and I began to feel chagrined for having yelled "Ay Chihuahua!" at him after that descent. Although at first the other villagers didn't believe Dionisio's story of a hot, growing mound of dirt, proof wasn't long in coming, and soon the decision to abandon their homes was made for them. In his earnest, flat Spanish, Espiritu described how all the fields had been buried, livestock killed, homes lost as the villagers, Espiritu's parents among them, loaded all they could on their burros and backs, and left the only life they and their ancestors for generations back had ever known. It was a very sad time, Espiritu emphasized ("muy triste, muy triste"). His parents don't like to talk about it. I stood there, sweating in the rising heat, and watched as Espiritu changed before my eyes. Beneath that baseball cap and T-shirt was a person who bore little relation to our affable, if slightly solemn, "native guide." Instead I saw a tough, enduring man, son of his parents, descendant of the pure-blooded Indians who had belonged to this land centuries before my people had left Europe -- a father himself, who supplemented his small income with pesos and dollars from the few foreign visitors who came to gawk at the agent of his people's misfortune. I reminded myself of something that is easy to forget when traveling: People live here. They are born, grow up, have children, love, suffer and die in the places that I pass through for a day's diversion. Our final stop on the ride back drove this point home in a blunt manner. In the
middle of a lava field stands the remains of a large stone church, its bell
tower the only part left intact. One can step off the lava's edge right onto
the second floor of the church. Looking out from there at the surreal black
moonscape surrounding the ruin, I tried to picture what the same place would
have looked like 54 years ago, when it was called San Juan Parangaricutiro. A
town square, a marketplace, homes, children. My imagination failed me.
Robert Riddell is a freelance writer who lives in San Francisco. |
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