Every time I travel I have to relearn how many things can go wrong and how many things can go right — all without your having any power to control any of it. Friday, on the eve of our morning flight to Ecuador, Julian dropped Sarah’s phone in the toilet.
Crisis. Then we found out that the phone still worked. Joy. Then we found out that the sound wasn’t working, so you couldn’t hear anything without earbuds. Crisis. Then we stuck the phone in a bag of rice (21st century voodoo) and eventually the sound started working again. Joy. Then the charging adaptor wouldn’t work with it. Crisis. Then using toothpicks and compressed air, we were able to extract two soggy grains of rice from the charging port…
And on and on.
We arrived last last night in Quito, everything having gone pretty seamless on the trip. No big hassles in customs, nothing critical left on the two planes. And, oh yeah, we weren’t dead in wreckage at the bottom of the Pacific. But man, the combination of the stress of getting ready for the journey, then the journey itself, and the altitude, really knocked me for a loop. Woke up this morning with what felt like the devil’s crusty essence in my eyeballs and lots of grouchy questions on my mind: Where are we? What are we doing here? Why is the art so bad in this apartment? Why didn’t it say something about the four-floor walk-up in the airbnb description? (This last one becomes more of an issue at 10,000 feet of elevation.) And of course we all woke up hungry, having eaten nothing but airport crap the day before. We threw on clothes, staggered down the stairs, and dear God, it’s Sunday in a Latin American country, which means that nothing is open, it’s like a Spanish colonial ghost town. Hungry, bleary, questioning — then things turned around just as quickly. A cafe presented itself, a delicious breakfast was served, and then we wandered over to the city basilica on our way home, astonished to see on our arrival aardvarks, crocodiles and iguanas in place of the usual gargoyles beneath the eaves.
The basilica turned out to be one of those places that made me question my agnosticism, covered with interesting art inside out, and featuring a full-throated congregation singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Spanish. But the best was yet to come. We scaled the church’s towers and looked down on a procession making its way down the street toward us. A priest carried a gold crucifix of some kind under a white canopy and everyone was pelting him with rose petals. The plaza in front of the cathedral, in fact, was decked out with large mosaics of flowers, like Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings but with flower petals instead of sand.
When the procession reached the plaza, the worshippers swirled through the mosaics, destroying them in a flurry of flowers, and pelted the priest with more petals. We dashed down to the ground level in time to see the procession enter the sanctuary where the crowded basilica burst into song as the organ roared and censers of incense wafted into the air. I found myself unexpectedly choke up by this heartfelt celebration of a belief that seemed so pure in that instant it was undeniable. And then I thought, I almost missed it, because so many things had to happen for me to be here, and the thought of how much of our existence is chance felt overwhelming, as did my gratitude for being here in this church at this moment.
My state of grace was short-lived. As we left the basilica, we passed a food stall selling roasted cuy. Cleo asked what the small animals on spits were, and in my jet-lagged, incense-clogged brain I told her the truth, that they were guinea pigs. Tears of disbelief followed, but not enough to wash away the image of the flower petals showering from the blue sky.
