Ecuador is a harsh beauty. The sun blisters the skin, and poverty the soul, of all who dare to get close to her. Those who subject themselves to her brutal love go blind. They stare blankly ahead as a six-year-old girl sings for nickels on the trolley, alone.
After three months of living in Quito, my heart callused over and I too stopped noticing. But guilt festered within me. I was ready to call it quits when Ecuador opened my eyes to incomparable, pristine loveliness: the rainforest.
We left early on a Friday morning, a horde of gringos trampling into the wilderness. After catching a plane, a bus, and two canoas (long, narrow boats with canopies) we finally reached the Tiputini Biodiversity Station.
Located on the Tiputini River in Eastern Ecuador, the Station encompasses five acres of virgin rainforest. The land is owned by the Huaorani people, an indigenous group that avoids contact with modern society. However, Universidad San Franciso de Quito and Boston University have reached an agreement with the group that allows students and researchers to enter the territory in exchange for computers and free university education.
At 7:00 am Saturday morning we suited up in rubber boots and layers of DEET bug spray. Our guide, Ramiro, lead us down Chorrongo Trail. A machete swung back and forth on his hip. He padded off the trail into a clearing with a single tree in the middle of it. “El jardin del Diablo,” he said, waving his hand around the clearing, the Devil’s Garden. The tree supports a vine that is home to a peculiar species of ant. The ants make the soil around the tree unsuitable for new tree growth. This ensures that the tree gets enough light.
Ramiro sliced open one of the pods along the vine, revealing an ant colony. “Lemon Ants,” he said, dipping his finger into the pod and touching it to his tongue. “Try it; unless you are a vegetarian. He passed the pod around and each one of us tasted the ants. They dissolved on my tongue like pop-rocks and their flavor was tart and clean, like lemon.
We passed a patch of palm trees along the way where Ramiro showed us how to peel back a palm leaf in order to separate the fiber from the plant cells. A friend tied one of the palms around her head and was bitten by a bug that had been living on its surface. “How is the pain?” Ramiro asked. He continued walking. Five minutes later, he plucked a stem off of a plant. The stem oozed a clear liquid, which Ramiro rubbed on my friend’s insect bite. The pain dulled and we were able to continue our hike.
That afternoon, as we rounded a bend in the trail, we were bombarded with a stench so awful that tears welled in my eyes. It was the first time that I had ever smelled death. A monkey lay on the forest floor, its neck wrenched at an odd angle. A vulture had punctured its side and it fell from the canopy to its death.
I gulped air and then trotted up to the monkey. Its face was shriveled and leathery, but its fur was soft and shiny. The monkey had been there only one night and already the hole in its side had been scraped to the bone. I studied the wound. And peering into its dull eyes, my reaction surprised me: I wasn’t sad or angry about this death.
Everything was right.
The rainforest is a beautiful, complicated web of living organisms and nonliving matter where each thing has a place and a purpose. There is no unemployment, no injury or illness without cure, and no hierarchy of importance among species. The vine, the monkey and the ant all live and die, without fearing death. Death generates life and so the cycle continues without the need to recognize or mark the accomplishments of any single journey. There is no egotism.
That night, we fell asleep to a symphony of sounds. The jungle was black and heavy. I closed my eyes, hoping that the next morning they would open again. I’d fallen in love with Ecuador.
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