Lago Doings

Lago Agrio reminds me a lot of Tijuana, in the sense that it´s the kind of town that a lot of people pass through, but never really stop to visit, or think about the people who actually live here all the time, as opposed to just move through it. It has very Wild West feel to it... the Colombian bakeries and hoochie clothing shops... the Nightclubs and Discotecas with copyright-violation cartoon characters as their logos... the sun that starts burning my shoulders to a crisp if I ever stand out in it for more than half a minute without sunscreen. I really enjoy the feeling of getting to know the city: knowing where to get the good 1 dollar batidos as big as your head, where to find air conditioned internet cafes, the lonely vegeterian resteraunt. It´s slowly but surely become my favorite place in Ecuador. It just feels warm and good and familiar, while much of Quito still has the big-city feel to me: I much prefer our little loveshack in Guapulo, huddled up against the enormous green hills dotted with eucalptus trees.

We´ve been here since late Tuesday night, involved in the inoculation of mycelium at the different experiment sites. It took all day on Tuesday to drive here, since the bridge near Papallacta was closed until 4pm, making our 5am wake-up time decidedly unnecesarry. Day 1 involved the funnest stuff, namely Brian wading out in the middle of Charapa (one of the oldest contamination sites, at 30-something years old) on a perilous bridge made of thin bamboo sticks and scooping up gooey, sticky oil into a bucket. Then we got to take the oil back to our central base (Donald´s house, who has generously offered his land as space for the project) and do the extremely fun task of pushing oil through a filtering net, in order to get the asphalt and rocks out. After a certain amount of time, the surgeon masks had to be busted out to avoid fume-induced headaches. We all agreed that anyone who wants to own a car should be forced to do a day or two of cleaning up spill sites and dealing with crude or 30-year old oil with their bare hands.

Day 2 involved less sticky oil handslegsclothes and a bit more brute labor. I carried sacks of old sawdust away from the experimental site pits and dumped them under a nearby tree to turn into mulch. We had to be careful not to dig up the layer of petroleum in the pits, as we didn´t want to be dumping oil-contaminated soil on Donald´s land! I reflected that for the past three summers now, my job or volunteer position has always inevitably involved some element of manual labor.

Yesterday we learned the art of making ¨burritos,¨ or a method of wrapping up the mycelium in cardboard to make them especially hungry and happy about growing and hunting for oil. We got to make a human chain while tossing the bags of mycelium (which to me look weirdly reminiscent of crushed, smashed Frosted Flakes) from the storage room into the car and then from the car to the pit site. It was like basketball practice all over again, as I huffed and heaved and tried not to smash Brian´s face as I hurled bag after bag of mycelium at him, trying to keep up with Corey´s tosses.

To celebrate getting done what we worried might be ten days worth of work in a mere three, we went out for some very important business: the drinking of chichi cara, which I am almost certainly spelling wrong. The adjectives used to describe this local beverage throughout the night and the blurry-eyed next morning included ¨bile from the Devil´s steaming entrails,¨ ¨butthole juice,¨ and ¨nasty schtuff.¨ Think aguardiente-flavored paint thinner. After the bar closed, we were invited to go to a salsa club by a group of large black men from Esmeraldas, and we ended up riding in the back of their very nice truck, after being poured more chichicara into plastic cups from one of the men, who carried the liquor around in what looked like a giant empty plastic bottle of cooking oil. Much salsa dancing and dance floor spinning madness ensued, including me frequently getting hit in the back of the head by the tiny beads on the end of the braids of the dreadlocked girl Brian was twirling enthusiastically around, and learning that one of our generous hosts was the owner of the brothel that we drive by every day to get to Donald´s h0use, the one with the cheesy mural with Avril Lavigne on it. This morning Corey asked me, ¨did we get invited to a salsa club by the owner of a brothel last night?¨, and I replied in the affirmative.

Today has been somewhat of a day off (Sunday is the day of rest, after all), as we all nurse our chuchakis (slang for hangover) and drink our cold batidos. This afternoon we stop by at Donald´s house for a final clean up, and then hopefully tomorrow or the day after we may get to go on another Toxic Tour to look for mushrooms at different contaminated sites and hopefully clone them in the little portable laboratory Corey and Chris built (think small greenhouse with plastic walls and tubes for a frame--it rocks, apart from tending to get very hot).

Brian and Corey have big plans for continuing the experiment back in Quito: the phrases they throw around in such conversations often involve ¨open-mouthed jars¨ and ¨small scale.¨ I have some pictures I intend on posting soon, including some of Lago I plan to steal from Jess, as well as some from our brief 6-day vacation in the coast a while back, including the famed Corvina (sea bass) festival, famed mostly in Cojimies, where it takes place.

In other important news, we now may possibly own a kitten, which Brian rescued from underneath a car last night. Brian lay in a puddle while I shone the little flashlight on the stranger´s cellphone I borrowed until I saw her, pulled her tail and Brian grabbed her. She has enormous bat-like ears, wide suspicious eyes and an extremely feral nature. I hope we get to keep her forever and ever.

there will be fungus

I like the little tiger logo: ¨protege el medio ambiente!¨

THE DOMINATOR

Donald shows off the paperwork for the lawsuit against Texaco (about 1.4th of the bookshelf). Donald is one of the cool leaders of the Amazon Defense Front and the awesome lender of land for the mushroom project.

This was a cool find, mushrooms growing out of oil! Jess dug it out of a can. Unfortunately a dog was attacking me at the moment of this photo so it turned out blurry. We are excited about cloning this little fellas and seeing what kind of magic they can pop out.

Spills near people´s lands and houses. You never had to walk very hard to find one, really.

Donald digs under the ground in front of the Jaramillo family´s house, a site Texaco was contracted to clean up.

They didn´t do such a good job. Donald only had to dig 3 inches before hitting a layer of oily water. Her son or nephew came out shirtless and blinking and onto the front porch and in response to people´s questions said yeah, on hot days like this one the oil fumes definitely made you dizzy and your joints and head hurt.

This site was a recent spill we drove past in the bus. Oil was spurting out of the pipe and splattering all over the ground. Here the rate of the oil flow is being measured... about a liter every two minutes.

Mushrooms growing out of the substrate placed at the Charapa site (the 30-year-old spill).

Brian shows off the yummy gunk. This is basically the consistency of the stuff mixed in with the sawdust and the mycelium.

Our superheroes.

Some birds nest fungi growing along with the oysters as well. A good sign with other species of fungi start moving in?

Here you can get kind of an idea of the layout of the experiment site: a kind of giant chicken coop, with chicken coop wire laid on top of the sawdust-mycelium-petroleum bins.

Brian kneeling in front of experiment site number 2, where petroleum is treated in large pits of substrate.

At Donald´s house, we got to chew on some tasty cacao. We sucked the juicy white fruit (which tasted sort of like lemon ice cream) off the seeds, which were then laid out to dry on the concrete in the sun. Exciting to think my saliva will be making a trip to Switzerland and eventually into some little kid´s mouth.

Several things that need to be said: considering we were only being shuttled around for about a total 4.5 hours, I was genuinely surprised at how many people we ran into who, upon hearing our little mycotour introductory spiel, rolled up their sleeves and showed us their chemical burns and their skin fungus and told us about their mother´s skin cancer or their blood diseases that caused them to miss a lot of work and rack up a lot of bills. I know discussion this issue runs the danger of coming off as just the listing of numb statistics: a bigger oil spill than Exxon Valdez, a total site size equivalent to Rhode Island. I know a lot of this runs the risk of coming off as just another Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action sort of stories (minus the Hollywood justice ending and multiplied by 15 years of paperwork and delays until a maybe verdict in the ends of 2009?).

In the end, I agree with what Corey wrote earlier: what really ending up getting me in the end was thinking about how I (or any of my friends or family) would feel if someone came along and dumped a 3 meter pit of oil in my front or backyard or neighborhood river. Not to mention how ugly those pipes looked, by the roads and in front of people´s houses, like hard copper bones jutting out of the landscape.

If nothing else, now that the tour is over and it´s appropriate to make these kinds of sweeping generalizations and pronouncements, I hope that people return to the U.S. with a deeper awareness of what many people have to live with in order for a select few to be comfortable. Maybe there are some things we are going to have to learn to do without: our comfort, our laziness, the easy convenience of our lives. Heavens knows there are enough people, including in Lago Agrio, who have gone without enough already: their health, their lives, their dignity. It sucks to hear a woman´s story of walking down a street made of crude oil with her two kids (one of the ways la compania cut costs was not paving proper roads but pouring crude excess waste out so that it would turn into hot and sticky asphalt), losing their sandals in the goopy mess and having to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Umm yeah people should have some say in how their land and territory is used, but unfortunately stuff keeps getting in the way of that relatively simple premise. It´s a complicated issue, to say the least.

One of the cooler long-term plans for the project is implementing a community-education project, where people can learn how to use these mycoremediations techniques themselves and clean up the messes on their own land without having to wait for the outcome of a lawsuit... god knows when that will work out, not just in terms of a verdict, but in terms of when people are actually going to be given money (the current number now is 8-16 billion). One of the more vital aspects of this project is the use of local, inexpensive materials, such as sawdust from a local broomstick factory. Some vague plans for the community education element include a graphic novel explaining the mycoremediation technique and an instructional film. Ultimately, people will hopefully be able to grow the mushrooms themselves, clean up the contamination on their own land and thus become actively involved in the remediation (both literal and metaphorical) of their land, themselves and their community.

mycelium running

THE MYCELIUM IS RUNNING!

Our mycotour in entirety was completely together by Friday: 12 people who are doing the 3-week tour in full, 18 people total who{ll be doing the Galapagos leg. We met some of the folks at a big shrimp boil held at our house in Guapulo, where I had the pleasure (re)meeting some pleasing Reedies. Then on Friday we all had dinner at the big hotel in Old Town where everyone is staying. It is good having grown-ups instead of teenagers in the tour group: there is no need for me to give my speech on the dangers of purling (“if boys re blue, and girls are red, then together, they make PURPLE, and we don{t want any purple here during our time together!”). Everyone can pretty much take care of themselves and is very low key and chill.

I cannot emphasize enough how much we lucked out on the group we have. Everyone seems really varied in terms of age and ackground, ranging from two Lewis and Clarkie soph-juniors, to an adorable Scottish-Irish-Canadian couple in their late 70s and early 80s respectively. But then again, everyone is from the West Coastish (California, Vancouver, Portland, Montana), everyone is liberal and of course everyone is fascinated by fungi to one degree or another: some casual hunters, others members of mycology clubs and two involved in remediation as a career).

On Saturday (the 12th) we left to the airport to Lago Agrio and the journey contained relatively little drama. We spent the afternoon in Lago giving a tour of the experiment site which hopefully Corey will have time to write about in more detail later, when Im not rushed to head off for dinner.



Oysters peeping out from the yummy substrate of petroleum and sawdust!