First Person

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From the Ashes

The Aftermath of a Volcano
Text & Photographs by Mary Susan Berry Kennedy

Our footsteps sounded like the fluffing of a feather pillow, and every step sent a dusting of ashes into the air as we plodded through the noxious landscape. John paused at the top of a small rise. He was entirely gray, and I realized that I was too. The ash that had engulfed everything in sight had covered us from head to toe. I stopped beside him, but I didn't stay long. The hulking outline of a cow, stiff and grotesque, appeared through the ash. The bovine smell, combined with the overwhelming stench of the ash, was more than I could stomach.

We were walking up the side of Volcán Tungurahua in central Ecuador. "The grandmother," as those who live near her call her, had erupted the week before, and I was walking through what used to be the village of Bilbao. Bilbao had been located on the other side of the mountain from Baños, a popular tourist town. But for all intents and purposes, Baños might as well have beena hundred miles away. The wind had spared Baños the ash and the lava this time, and the only evidence that anyone in Baños had of a volcanic eruption were a few speculators gathering lava rocks to sell in the town for two dollars each.

I continued up the slope of the mountain, avoiding dead cattle along the way. I shook a vine - dust erupted into the air and two red tomatoes emerged.

"You see that bridge?" John asked.

"What bridge?"

The bridge, completed only a month before, would have saved hours of walking time for the villagers walking down the steep mountain path. Bilbao had waited for years for the bridge -- and now, with John's help, I managed to spot the crumpled steel poles that had been the town's pride.

A week earlier, I'd heard almost nothing about Tungurahua, save for a tourists' travel advisory. But a chance meeting with an American married to an Ecuadorian, and his stories of displaced families, ruined crops and abandoned villages meant that two days later, I was riding down the highway in the back of a dump truck with my friend John and his friend Gabriel on top of several tons of rice and alfrecho -- animal food that John called "nutritional sawdust."