Living with Pacaya

The volcano had been doing this for as long as anyone could remember, which in San Vicente Pacaya meant about forty years, because nobody here was much older than that and the ones who were didn't like to talk about it. Dr. Elena Muñoz, volcanologist, Universidad de San Carlos, had been monitoring Pacaya for three years. She had a seismograph, a tiltmeter, a thermal camera, and a grant that expired in August. The volcano had lava, about two thousand years of practice, and no deadline whatsoever. The village sat on its north slope. This was, by any rational assessment, a poor decision. Elena had said as much in her first report. The village had been there for two hundred years. Her report had been filed and, she suspected, composted. Roberto, who ran the tienda on the main road, had a framed photograph behind the counter of the 2014 eruption. In it, a river of lava flowed across a football pitch while, in the background, clearly visible, a man walked a dog. "Was that you?" Elena asked when she first noticed it. "No. The dog was Ernesto's." "I mean, were you concerned?" Roberto looked at the photograph as though seeing it for the first time. "The lava was slow. The dog was not." This was, Elena discovered, the prevailing attitude. Pacaya erupted. This was what it did. It erupted the way weather happened — periodically, sometimes inconveniently, occasionally with property damage. You cleaned the ash off your roof. You redirected lava with earthworks if it came toward the road. You did not leave, because where would you go, and also the soil here was incredible. The soil was, in fact, incredible. Volcanic soil grew coffee that made Elena's colleagues in Guatemala City speak in the hushed tones normally reserved for first editions and newborns. Roberto grew tomatoes that were, objectively, unreasonable. They were the size of softballs and tasted like what tomatoes had been trying to be for their entire evolutionary history. "The volcano gives and takes," Roberto said once, in a tone suggesting he had calculated the exchange rate and found it acceptable. Elena's monitoring station was a concrete hut halfway up the slope, built by a previous researcher who had optimistically installed air conditioning that had never worked. She climbed to it every morning, checked her instruments, logged the data, and hiked back down in time for lunch. The seismograph showed constant low-level tremors. The tiltmeter showed gradual inflation on the south flank. The thermal camera showed hot spots that migrated around the crater like thoughts. Her reports said: "Continued activity within normal parameters." This was technically true and practically meaningless. Pacaya's normal parameters included everything from gentle steam to pyroclastic flows. Saying it was within normal parameters was like saying the weather was within weather parameters. One night in April, the volcano put on what Roberto called "a show." Lava fountains, two hundred metres. The sky glowed orange. Ash fell on the village like black snow. Elena drove to her monitoring station at 3 AM and found her seismograph going so hard the needle had torn the paper. Roberto was on his porch when she came back down at dawn, sweeping ash off the steps with a broom. "Big night," he said. "Your seismograph—" she started. "I don't have a seismograph. I have a cup of water on the windowsill. If it shakes, something's happening." He kept sweeping. "Last night, the cup fell off." "Are you going to evacuate?" He looked at her. Behind him, the volcano was steaming peacefully, the way it did after a big night, like a man sitting quietly after an argument. "Elena," he said. "I evacuated in 2014. I went to my cousin's in Escuintla. He has no tomatoes and terrible coffee and a television that only gets one channel. I came back after four days." He finished sweeping and went inside. Through the doorway, she could see the photograph of the lava on the football pitch. She could hear him putting the coffee on. Her grant expired in August. She applied for an extension. She cited ongoing volcanic activity, insufficient data, and the need for continued monitoring. She did not mention the tomatoes, or the coffee, or the fact that she had started sweeping her own porch in the mornings without checking the seismograph first. The extension was approved. She is still there.