On our last day in Baños, we finally had time to visit the town church. I’m sorry I waited so long, because the place was painted from floor to ceiling with huge murals depicting various miracles perpetrated by Nuestra Señora del Agua Santa, the patron saint of Baños (who, when she isn’t performing miracles in Ecuador, is the mother of Jesus Christ).
The first appearance of Our Lady of the Sainted Waters was at an earthquake in the 1800s, which, while wreaking havoc on the small town, released the thermal waters at the base of a waterfall for which the town is now known, a good news/bad news situation if there ever was one.
If you have sharp eyes you can spot some of our group in the pool in the foreground. And yes, they make everyone wear bathing caps, even bald men, despite the hearty brown color of the water. (We rented ours for fifty cents. Rented bathing caps — I can sense my germaphobe friends cringing from thousand of miles away.) I know what you’re thinking: Would sainted waters really be the color of dung? But we all know the Lord works in mysterious ways. And they felt great.
According to the murals in the church, the Virgin Mary appears when the residents of Baños are in tight spots, which, because of the nature of Baños — a town surrounded by rivers and waterfalls — involves either (A) falling from a high place into a river and drowning or (B) just plain falling into the river and drowning. At the moment of truth, the would-be victim beseeches “Our Lady of the Sainted Waters,” who then intervenes and saves them. The style of the paintings, while somewhat primitive, was very action-oriented, telling stories in a condensed way. They reminded me of the Mexican milagro paintings on tin, which I was collecting for a while. I loved them, and so did Cleo and Julian, who ran from one mural to another, demanding to know, “What did the Virgin Mary do in this one?” When I came to this particular mural, though, I paused.
We had just spent ten days with our cousins dangling from high wires like this, often in tarabitas (cable cars) like the one depicted in this painting, and the one in this photo:
The fear of falling, of course, is part of the thrill, but I had safely enshrouded myself in a denial of gravity until I saw this painting in church, perhaps the same denial that had enshrouded the Señor Luis Gonzales in the painting. Our leap of faith, though, extended ever further as our drive for thrills and unique experiences led us to try swings over canyons…
And even this…
(Which I will never, ever do again.)
Señor Luis Gonzales didn’t have steel cables, but he did have faith, and, according to the painting, the Virgin Mary provided him with a floating log to cling to as soon as he (safely) hit the water. I wonder if she would’ve done the same for us, even though I don’t think beseeching Our Lady of the Waters would be the first thing that would come to mind while plummeting from a zip-line cable. And yet…faith is something we all have when traveling in a foreign country — something we have to have. If you didn’t somehow believe that strangers in another country have your best interests at heart, that somehow the driver of your passenger van is really, really good at passing cars on blind curves, you’d make yourself crazy with worry doing this. Sarah and I talk about travelers’ luck, when it’s running with us (cool interactions on the street, a random restaurant serves us a great meal, a taxi comes along just as we’re despairing) and against us (everything we want to see in a given town is closed for renovations, the rain starts just as we leave the hotel, a jacket is left on a bus). On an arduous horseback ride yesterday, which involved scaling a mountain on narrow cliffs astride skittish horses — one of those experiences in which you’re trying not to panic because you don’t want your kids to see you panicking — we noticed a white dog that had been following us for the entire ride. Sarah speculated that our beloved dead dog Walter sent the white dog to look out for us. Cleo added that with its white fur and blue eyes, it looked like an angel. (Maybe Walter did send it; we all finished the ride safely.)
There’s some kind of faith at work here, even if it’s not courtesy of the Virgin Mary. (Which the kids wanted to know more about, as well as why Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ father. Subject for another blog.)
Now let’s all say a prayer to Nuestro Señor del Agua Santa (Our Pooch of the Sainted Walters).
