“So, I just have to ask,” says Steve Macdonald through the phone from Vancouver, in the middle of his third confirmation call, “are you Canadian?” I laugh. “No, I’m from Minnesota. Not too far off.” I imagine him shaking his head. “Normally I pride myself on being able to pick out accents, especially Canadian accents… But yours had me stumped!”
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
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