Disclaimer: I wrote this months ago, but I’m just now posting it. After the earthquake, I came home early. I’ve been trying to get back on my feet. Reset my brain. Remind myself that earth isn’t angry with me in particular. It’s nothing personal. Somethings just are. Anyways, I finally started writing again and thought I should probably just post this, unedited because I still can’t believe it happened, I can’t read it.
I wake up around 6:30 am on Sunday having fallen asleep maybe three hours before. There was slight tremor just before sunlight that woke everyone else up.
Even more than a week after, whenever I’m still, my body believes the ground is shaking, jerking back and forth. It’s like being on a boat for a few days and then when you finally stand on land, your body thinks it’s still on the boat and the ground is still moving. This is what it feels like after living through several earthquakes and tremors.
The first thing we do is try to find more water and food. There’s a small shop next to the hostel that is functioning even though everything is on the ground. We tell the shop owners what we want and they hand it to us. We buy several liters of water, crackers, cookies, canned tuna, chifles, and whatever else we think will sustain us. Surprisingly, it all costs less than ten dollars. There’s no point in raising the prices though, the money won’t leave this town, not for a while, wealth is inconsequential. Everything is destroyed and the town doesn’t have the resources to rebuild.
We sit around making calls to our contacts in quito. Everyone’s saying what we’re afraid to hear: that most of the roads are closed due to landslides and the roads that aren’t closed are open only for rescue vehicles.
Worse, even the roads to the closest towns over are closed from landslides and won’t be open until Monday or later. At least, that’s what they tell us.
Around 9am, more people from the town come to our hostel to charge phones and rest for a bit. A lot of people slept on the mountain after the first earthquake. Not everyone knew the Tsunami warning had been lifted. But even still, there was nothing to come down to. Houses had fallen, buildings, centers. Seven of which had burned. The mountain was safe and distant enough away to pretend that there wasn’t only destruction waiting to greet them when they came back down.
Javier, the hostel owner has made it clear that any and all are welcomed. He goes and buys another large jug of water. He lets anyone he comes use his electricity and drink his water and eat what little food he has to give. It’s better now, in the sunlight though. Because the solar panels are collecting more energy and because daylight is decidedly less frightening than night.
One of his friends comes while he’s out. He can barely walk and he’s looking for a phone charger. He tells us that he was at his friend’s house when the earthquake hit. That part of it fell on top of him. When he gets out of his truck, he’s limping. WE help him to a chair. He asks if any of us have an IPhone charger but none of us has his model of iPhone so we can’t help. He tells us he hasn’t talked to any of his family since the day before and he hasn’t had a signal since and now his phone is dead. He just wants to know where they are or if they’re alive.
We cannot give him even this.
Javier comes back from making the rounds. He’s been periodically checking on his neighbors to see if they need anything. He has offered what room he does have for anyone who needs it. There will be no tourists here. There will be no influx of people who don’t already live here. When he sees his friend, he immediately comes to his side asking if he’s alright. He helps him to the bathroom and pours ocean water over his hands so that he can clean them. There is no running water, so this is what we have. A giant bucket with a gallon jug cut in half to pour the water over our hands.
Javier also has a phone charger he can use. It works if you hold the phone just so. After a while, his phone starts vibrating with missed notifications and incoming calls. He does not tell us, but from his face we can tell that none of the news he receives is extraordinarily good. Its like learning that your entire family is alive but unwell. You want to be happy but you ahead you can see all the mountains you’ll have to climb, all the pains you’ll have to overcome. Sunday is too soon to face anything.
By 10, the only plan we’ve come up with is to get more sleep. There are no more tremors on Sunday. Or, if there are, our minds and bodies have blessed us with the feeling that the ground is always moving so any true tremors are passed off as mind tricks.
I sleep for two hours. Carlin beside me. We lay on top of bits of plaster that had fallen the night before. We smell like desperation. Still I’m convinced those two hours I slept are the best sleep I got in the week following the earthquake.
When I wake up, everyone is downstairs packing up there things. Emily tells me that we’re leaving Canoa. That Nate and Abby have found someone to give us a ride to Bahia, the next town over. We’re leaving at one. At seven, someone from the IES program is supposed to meet us at Bahia and take us back to Quito.
While we wait, one of the Argentinean girls that was also at the hostel asks to use my phone to email her family. The service my phone has is tenuous at best. But for ten minutes it works for her. She emails her family. After I am gone, they email her back.
When it’s close to 1pm, we leave the hostel to go meet with the guy who offers us a ride to Bahía. We hug and kiss Javier and thank him profusely for saving our lives, for providing us shelter, for existing in the same time we exist. Even after we got out, even now, a week and a half after, I am still asking myself what are the chances that the hostel we booked would be made of wood and have solar power. What are the chances that we live in one of the few buildings untouched by the earthquake? I am trying to stop searching for answers and accept that some things happen just because: without reason or rhythm. It was written that I would be there, and so I was.
We get to the beach only to find the man who has offered us a ride has also offered other people rides. He’s taking people out of Canoa to the nearest hospital. Though we are upset because we want to be as far from Canoa as we possibly can be, we understand that there are people who need even more than we do. He tells us he’ll be back at three to take us.
At 2, Emily and I get restless so we play in the ocean while we wait. I’m wearing the only bra I brought and a pair of spandex shorts. She’s dressed about the same. We go into the water until it reaches our lower thighs. The sand is hot. The water is warm. We wanna feel hopeful. That maybe we’ll get out of here. But seeing is believing and the only thing we see is dead fish and fallen buildings.
We wait in the water with two German girls. (Or maybe their Canadian? I met so many people there, I’ve started to forget.) The girls tell us that they’re in Ecuador tutoring kids in English. They’re not all from Germany (Canada?) but they are all on the same program. I exchange numbers with them, tell them to text me or call me when they get out.
At three, the guys who told us they would give us a ride, still haven’t returned. We all start to feel it. The disappointment. We think that maybe they’re not coming back. That maybe we won’t be able to meet Juan Carlos in Bahia at seven. We really try to be brave, to be strong, to not let our anxieties show. But it’s clear in all of us.
It isn’t until five, that the guy comes back to give us a ride.
He charges us ten dollars a person. All nine of us load up in two trucks. Emily and I opt to sit in the back. With us, another guy named Fran also sits. He’s from Porto Viejo. All he can talk about is the earth quake and how Porto Viejo is even worse than Canoa and he doesn’t know if his families alive. He hasn’t heard from them, hasn’t been home yet. He actually protested taking us to Bahia. Before his friend agreed to drive us, he also agreed to take Fran to Porto Viejo to check on his family.
As Fran talks to us, he continues to pour boxed white wine into a white coffee mug. He offers us some, but the last thing we need is alcohol. Nothing mixes well with despair. Not this. Not anything.
But he keeps drinking and staring into the distance. And we know what he’s thinking because we’re thinking it to. He’s shirtless, and I can’t tell if his skin tone is naturally golden or if he’s extremely tan from living on the equator. Probably both. But his hair has natural blond highlights from so much sunlight and when I ask, he tells me it’s natural. I noticed a lot of Canaoans had blonding hair: the roots and locks were dark brown but as their hair trails it turns blond. His was the same.
I hold my phone up and take candids of him. When he notices, he starts to smile and pose. He laughs and asks if I’ll post them. I say only if he’ll let me. And he says yes.
The drive to Bahia is just short of an hour and we get there around 6ish. The sun is starting to descend. The last time the sun set, I thought the world had broken, that it was going open up and swallow me whole. We, none of us, like the darkness coming over us. Its too soon after the earthquake. It feels like it happened a decade ago. It feels like its still happening.
Seven comes and goes and we cannot reach Juan Carlos nor the driver. The IES kids call Gladys, their program director, and she cannot reach him either. Secretly, Emily and I both believe he has died. That something happened on his way down to get us. He got caught in a land slide maybe. Or drove over a crack and the car went sideways. It’s been such a rough go that the ways he could have died are endless, each scenario playing behind our eyes. We don’t tell each other until after we’re back in Quito that we were sure Juan Carlos had died. On Monday night, when we’re retelling our friends what happened to us, Emily turns to me and she says I thought he had died. I thought something terrible had happened to him and that we were never going to get back to Quito. Her eyes are wide in the way she sometimes talks when she’s serious but not necessarily sure in what she’s saying. “I thought he had died.” I nod my head and say me too.
But Juan Carlos is not dead. We just mistimed his arrival.
But before we know he is alive, before we know that it’s just traffic, it becomes fully dark. One of our friends (I’m leaving her unnamed for what I’m going to say next) is freaking out because early in the semester she was robbed at knife point and because there is no electricity so darkness is more profound than we normally experience it. And because the last time it got dark, Earth tried to shake us off it’s surface.
A man who has been at the bus stop since we got there to wait for Juan Carlos tells us about a hostel we could go to that’s very close by. We walk for five minutes in the dark following this man whom we have no name for to a hostel that has no running water or electricity but does have space to sleep if we have to spend another night.
The hostel owner lets us in free of charge. No electricity, no water, just a gated patio that we can sleep in. We can get that anywhere (minus the gated part) so he doesn’t charge us. But the man who brought us there asks if we can spot him a couple bucks to get a cab to wherever he was trying to go. I do not understand it. He waited there for hours never once even looking at the buses that passed us by. Was he hoping that whoever picked us up would give him a ride too? There is a strong hitchhiking culture throughout all of Ecuador. Everyone offering what little space they have to those who need it.
I give him all the coins in my coin purse and he says thank you like I’ve just saved his life. Maybe I have.
The hostel owner, also unnamed, takes us to the little courtyard where we sit down on porches and wait. Emily and I are a bit separated from the group. She holds my hand like it’s the only thing reminding her she’s still alive.
She tells me that even before the earthquake, she never really liked the dark. Now, here, thousands of miles away from where she feels safest, in the pure darkness following a natural disaster, reality has tilted. Are we alive? Did we die and everything that has happened afterwards has just been some long what if scenario playing through our heads in the last seconds before the light goes out? Are we still here?
The IES kids are talking about back up rides, other people that can come and get us, but Emily and I have had enough of hope. If we get out, we get out.
Someone gets a call finally from Juan Carlos. He’s crossing the bridge into Bahia. He’s twenty minutes away. I don’t believe it. Neither does Emily. But the rest of us seem to have cheered. Maybe because they knew who Juan Carlos was—I don’t know. But Emily and I are in the bathroom when he gets here and even though everyone is happy, we just feel separated. There’s a subtle dissonance between what is happening and what we are feeling. Numbness. We are numb.
Juan Carlos rides in the back with us. The front seat is taken by the driver, his wife, and a guide. The bus is cramped but who the fuck even cares? We’re on our way. We pass back through Bahia, through canoa, to a small town near there. Our guide’s family lives in this small town. (I can’t remember the name of it) He wants to go see his sister. To check in.
We pass landslides and cracked roads. Its staggering to see how deep the damage runs. Trees have fallen. Power lines have been cut. We go as far as we can. We come upon this crack in the road too large to pass. The street is unleveled. It drops at least a foot, breaks. We cannot pass. Just in front of the crack, two dogs lay watching. Maybe one of them is hurt and they are hoping in what little dog hope they may have that we save them. We can’t even save ourselves it seems.
We turn around because there is no way to go forward. We do not reach our guide’s sister’s house. We do not learn if she is okay. We just drive on. There is nothing we can do now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week. Not now.
We haven’t eaten since 11am, but we’re not hungry anymore. Once we really get underway, we all drop off, sleeping as if we’ve never slept. It’s been days for some of us, only hours for others.
The drive to Quito is seven hours on a good day. On the way down, Juan Carlos and crew drove ten hours, picked us up then drove eight hours back. Eighteen hours, at least. Eighteen hours to get us out of Canoa.
At around midnight, our driver stops at a gas station and takes a nap.
At around four am we stop in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. It’s a predominately indigenous town. There, we drop off our guide. His family stands in the doorway watching us. Our driver and his wife ask to use the bathroom. The rest of us are either sleeping or drifting in and out of reality.
In between five and six, we come upon what can only be described as an Ecuadorean rest-stop. Later it’s explained that the government has asked certain restaurants to run abnormal hours if they are situated along carreteras (highways) or if they’re on the path out of larger cities.
So, sometime after five am we all unload the cramped bus and have our first real meal in days. Its Seco de Pollo: a plate full of white rice with chicken and curry. In this moment, we all realize how tilted reality has become for us. We are at a restaurant that typically serves lunch at 5 am eating chicken and rice. Even though it’s been a day since we’ve eaten, we do not eat very much. The lighting is weird. Dim like the sockets call for 60 watts but they can only find 40 watt bulbs. And we can see how tired all the workers are and we somehow know that all our faces mirror theirs.
We are the only ones there and none of us are really talking but the background noise bubbles up like fuzz and it feels overwhelming how little it actually is.
It’s the dissonance I was feeling earlier.
None of us have cried any, but I feel the stress building up as we pile into the car.
We sleep fitfully until the sun rises. And then we see it. The Mitad del Mundo monument. Now all of us know where we are. We’ve all been here before and we know now that we’re close to Quito, close to home. It’s still so very unreal. We are so close.
