Collegian Column #3

I invented a constellation.

I spotted it the night we camped next to Laguna Limpiopungo. The lake is so high—12,500 feet—and the night sky was so crystalline after a stainless steel sunset that I found myself able, for the first time, to connect the dots and animate the astral menagerie: a tiger, a grasshopper, a salt shaker, a bowman; a monkey king in a golden crown. My spouting volcano.

The sight of this night sky, over many years and many millennia, must have seeped into the land and the people who live in the valley below. In fact it’s just one long valley that runs the entire length of Ecuador, nearly straight north–south, framed by two mountain ranges called the Eastern and Western Cordilleras. Everything encompassed by these three parallel lines seems astrotropic, reaching up always towards the stars.

Many of the buildings naturally reach for the sky. The tallest structures in Quito and Guayaquil qualify as skyscrapers. Every church in every town signposts a path upwards, their crosses looking like arrows strung and waiting to be fired. I remember seeing in Baños, perched up on a hill, a giant neon-encrusted cross that, when lit at night, functioned like a prayer candle burning for the whole town. In a Catholic country like Ecuador, church spires and crosses are only the most overt attempt to touch the heavens. The summit of one mountain, Chimborazo, is the farthest point outward from the center of the Earth.

There is also an accidental kind of flora that can be found nearly everywhere here, on buildings of every size and age. It consists typically of a column of cement bricks and mortar, topped with a plume of rebar extending six to eight feet up into the air, swaying sometimes in the stronger breezes. So many buildings are unfinished, begun when a little extra money is had, and planned for ambitiously. No building ever seems designed to be only one story, though many end up that way. At some point the construction stops, occasionally leaving a second or third floor with no walls and a stairway to nowhere. Children play here. When an abandonment is particularly fresh it seems nearly possible to pinpoint, down to the very second, when the last penny was expended.

Once I saw from a bus one of these buildings, with stands of rebar forming a five-by-eight matrix on its flat cement roof. Some of the posts were so tall as to be drooping or twisting, and one would reach out into space to touch the hand of another, looking when taken together like dancers engaged in a vibrant twirl.

The women in Cotopaxi province wear feather-banded fedoras; looking at one from above in a store window was like looking at a topographical map of Ecuador, with its two ridges and crease in between. More properly, Ecuador looks like a pair of hands pressed together upward in prayer, each city draped along the valley floor like a string of glistening rosary beads. All this has made me feel conspicuous, more aware of my being lapsed. Have I been missed?

I wonder if the thugs who robbed Ming and Travis at knifepoint in Cuenca weren’t somehow asking us to join this nation in prayer, arms raised and palms out to the stars above us.