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.