Volcanic Ash

Yesterday, Monica and I were returning from a walk to the corner stores for some milk and a movie, to have a gemutlisch family time with hot chocolate around the fire. Looking up, we were surprised to see the eastern half of the sky had turned a unusually menacing purple-gray color. We thought a whopper of a storm was brewing, and hurried home.

Not long afterwards, it started to “snow” a fine gray drizzle of volcanic ash, which started covering everything with a thin layer. We rushed out to put the dogs in the shed, covering our nose and mouth to avoid breathing or swallowing the acrid stuff that burned our eyes and throat and stiffened our hair. The newscast informed us that a volcano in the Ecuadorian Amazon, appropriately named “Reventador” (burster, exploder, blower), had erupted unexpectedly, putting a nearby road out of commission and spewing ash over a 200 kilometer radius.

We had already sealed the doors and windows against the “Guagua Pichincha” explosion a few years ago, so no ash filtered in, but everywhere was a sulphurous smell of rotten eggs, especially when it rained just enough to wet the stuff. Electricity was cut off in the evening, and we had a fitful night of dizziness, headaches, unquenchable thirst, and an uncanny darkness and silence outside.

This morning we awoke to a “snow day” with ash still falling. The newscast said there had been more eruptions during the night, and there was no school nor work until further notice. The whitish-gray sky and land outside, the accumulation on our skylights, and the unusual cold and quiet, I kept having that excited feeling I used to have as a kid on a snow day, and having to remind myself that it was not snow but poison.

All this is very new to us, having lived most of the time in Cuenca, which is south of the volcanic area and never sees this kind of pnenomenon. Those who have always lived in the northern part of the country seem to just take it into stride, which I guess we will learn to do also.