You Shall Not Pass!

If one makes plans in the Rio Verde communities, past the dirt road turn-off in Lita, one must take the weather into account. Otherwise, one may die.

On the road to Rio Verde - Horse Crossing Muddy Water

The wednesday afternoon I drove to collect Oscar from Chota was heavy with a chaotic spectacle of clouds. Low, wispy clouds stretched across the valley, like the languid smoke from countless smouldering embers hidden between the sugar cane fields. Thick, puffy clouds emanated from beyond the distant eastern mountains, seething up stupendously to the inner reaches of space. I drove slowly, fighting with my curiosity and wonder to keep my eyes on the road. Around the mountain bend a flat crown of clouds remained visible behind. When I arrived at the site, I mentioned what I had seen to Oscar and joined him for two hours of work. When we departed for Ana Lucia’s house in Ibarra, neither of us thought to what the clouds might portend.

On the road to Rio Verde - Villagers Returning

Thursday morning came and we woke early at the sound of our alarm clocks. By a quarter past six we stood in front of the door to Pablo’s offices, waiting for our ride to Lita. The streets were empty. Along came a young man on a bicycle and sat down beside us. He nodded our way. “Are they often late?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said.

At half past six, one of Pablo’s employees arrived in the organisation’s shabby Mazda 4x4 double-cabin pickup. As we prepared to load our tools and my saxophone into the cabin, I asked him if there would be much cargo in the bed. “No, not much,” he replied. We placed our gear in the cabin, thinking to move some of it to the bed before leaving the city. Another pickup, a massive Toyota Hilux, pulled into the space behind the Mazda. Another of Pablo’s employees stepped down from the passenger side door and waved to us. We exchanged greetings and helped her load a few bags more into the Mazda cabin, then the two employees, the young man, Oscar and I boarded and we left behind the quiet sidewalk.

Chicks in Boxes

We stopped on Fray Vacas Galindo, beside the old railroad tracks leading to Highway 35 and out of the city. The driver made a call on his cellphone. He left the car, still talking on his phone, and approached the only open shutter on the block. From the cabin we watched him negotiate a deal with someone inside. The other employee turned around in her seat and asked us to help load some boxes onto the bed. As we climbed out of the cabin and picked up the boxes I had a good view of the dozens of little chickens inside each one. This was the cargo for the chicken-raising project in Rio Verde Medio. Next came four 25 kg sacks of chicken feed. Between the 100 kg of feed and the 70 chicks in boxes there was a full load on the bed.

Across the valley and beyond the first of the eastern mountains, Oscar woke me from a doze. “Look,” he said, pointing to outside the passenger window. I did not see what he intended me to. Realising my confusion, he added “The waterfall.” A wide stream of water was cascading down from the peak of a mountain on the northern side of the Mira River. On our last two visits this waterfall had been a thin white line barely visible from the highway. “It’s been raining here,” said the driver in response to our conversation about the volume of the waterfall. “Jamie saw huge clouds on this side of the mountain range, towards Lita, yesterday,” Oscar mentioned. “You have been to Lita in all sorts of conditions, haven’t you?” I asked the driver.

“Yes.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to pass the roads to the Rio Verde communities?”

“We won’t have any problems today. I have seen worse than this.”

Thinking that he must not have seen the clouds I had seen, I closed my eyes and fell back asleep.

When I awoke, we were at the military checkpoint just before Lita. A soldier was directing the pickup into the small parking area and had asked for Oscar and I to bring our passports to a little desk underneath a tarp. We crossed the two lanes to the desk and I sat down on a bench against one of the three waist-high walls. Still bleary from sleep, I heard someone say, “Remove your jacket.” I looked at the soldier sitting behind the desk. “You cannot wear that jacket here,” he repeated. I looked at him. “What?” I asked. “Your jacket, you have to take it off here.” Finally my brain clicked on. I began to unzip my military camouflage jacket while asking, “You mean here at the checkpoint, right?”

“Yes, you cannot wear that jacket at the checkpoint.”

When we were back in the car I turned to Oscar. “I’ll have to find some military camouflage pants.”

Former Road to Rio Verde

Three minutes later we were in Lita, turning onto the dirt road. As we climbed the first steep incline, rounded a corner and began to climb again, a siren interrupted us. The driver pulled over and we watched as first an ambulance, then a pickup truck with seven people in the cabin and about a dozen crowded together on the bed, and then a police pickup with

Road to Rio Verde - Waiting at the bridge

another dozen people packed onto the bed passed on our left. Oscar looked at me. “I don’t think we have luck with the roads today,” he said in English. “No,” I replied, “I don’t think we’ll be doing any painting today.” Continuing along the road for several minutes we came to the first clay bank, an enormous red wall of earth which usually presented us with the first sign of how the roads further along would be. On our last visit we encountered a heavy truck unable to pass, but I managed to drive the pickup as it had fishtailed through several puddles of mud. Today was different; there was no road. The road was there where it passed over the river on a short bridge, and it turned right to head in the direction of the slope -- and that was where a lake of mud occupied the ground where the road normally continued, two small trees bent over in the middle of the lake. There would be no passing through to the Rio Verde communities.

Road to Rio Verde - Young men and their bikes.

As the employees waited around trying to postpone the inevitable decision of returning to Ibarra, mission incomplete, I climbed onto the mud bank to take some pictures. While I was taking photos of the slide, two men from the Rio Verde Medio community arrived on foot. They spoke briefly with the driver and then set out into the jungle. When I had climbed back down and cleaned the mud from my boots in the river, I asked him what they had said. “Someone on a motorbike was washed off the road last night by one of the landslides. They found his body under the slide this morning.”

Chicks in Baskets

We began to discuss our options. The employees tried contacting Pablo, but neither of them had reception. We waited. I took more photos. A trickle of Rio Verde Medio community members began to arrive, and then a stream, until half of the community had marched through the mud to reach us. All at once we began to engage in activity, moving the chicks from boxes to leaf-lined baskets, deconstructing the cardboard boxes to make basket lids, lashing the feed bags to their horses. As each basket was filled with chicks someone would heft it onto their back and start out across the lake of mud. When all of the cargo had been distributed and taken away we bid farewell and a safe voyage back to the remaining members of the community and watched as three young men who had arrived in the meantime hauled a motorbike through the mud. The employees tried once more to contact Pablo, could not, and at last made the decision to abandon the rest of our mission and return to Ibarra.

Road to Rio Verde - Help Arrives

On the drive back Oscar and I were discussing the efficiency of weekly drives to Lita that might or might-not end in a quick return. “We have no way of knowing if the roads are going to be cleared by the time we arrive or not,” chimed in the driver. “So you drive down regardless of the weather and if the roads are blocked you return to Ibarra?” I asked. He nodded. “That is a remarkably inefficient way of conducting business.” Oscar looked at me. “Jamie,” he said, “better to be inefficient and alive, than efficient and dead.” I looked out the window. Thick torrents of water gushed down the mountainside. Above, the open sky shone blue.