Intag Cloud Forest

The calls of birds – they called me wide awake,

though I had left my bed some hours past,

their world awash with green, the sun to take

inside those leaves, that life might grow and last.

 

The air filled rich and damp into each lung –

the clouds to permeate my very skin,

replenish life diverse, from water wrung,

throughout the forest, harmony within.

 

I stepped into this realm but as a guest,

the system’s balance well complete. I come –

oh, let me enter not disturbing, lest

I, careless, trample equilibrium.

 

To witness, tend, protect, and steward, bask,

rejoice in glory – this was our first task.

We spent five days in the Intag Cloud Forest Reserve. Five days of damp bed sheets every morning, no running-water toilets, a host of bug bites from twenty minutes without bug spray, blisters, and no meat. Five days of brisk air, bird choruses, clouds enveloping the mountains, fresh salads, sunny mornings and rainy afternoons, hikes through the forest, conversations in hammocks, cuban cigars, leaves larger than my face, and waterfall showers. Five days experiencing the wonders of the Andean mountains.

How do you take in all the marvel of this? Somehow my brain subconsciously expects a different lifestyle, a different continent, to entail a different me. But there is no alternate reality that one transcends to experience the earth’s faraway wonders – just the same itching, bug-bitten skin; the same wide-open eyes; the same mind. It’s exhilarating and it’s gritty and it’s real.

We stayed at a self-sustaining farm on the reserve and got to see a bit of how it was run. They primarily grow coffee, but also have maize, bees, and a varied garden, among other things. We used showers with a solar heating system (that was questionable in its success) and compostable latrines full of human waste that in a few years will become fertilizer. But really, I’m wondering, what makes flushable toilets so addicting anyway?

We ate the fruits straight off the branches for snacks and had salad from the garden at almost every meal. One day we hiked around the mountain and learned some about the plants and creatures we encountered; another afternoon we spent a few hours helping transport chopped wood around the mountain (I know, tough labor). We met some local women who sell woven goods made from agave and learned about their work process.

But the vulnerability of this place remained a constant presence as well. In the past couple decades, the Junín community has successfully ousted two mining companies from Intag. They are currently fighting back against the third would-be extractive enterprise. Due to the heavy economic crisis and massive foreign debt, the government overwhelmingly supports oil and mining industries throughout the country. As it happens, it is also willing to make and break promises of “development” on a whim to convince communities to accept these industries at the cost of their land and way of life. When the communities continue to resist, the government sends military force to quell any concerns.

It’s one thing to hear about these kinds of fights in history books or even on the news – it’s another to stand face to face with people who have spent months in prison and borne physical wounds because they protested the government permitting the destruction of their lands. Forms of legal social activism remain limited in Ecuador, and the dominant party’s political monopoly leaves little recourse to justice for protesters.

That hasn’t stopped the fight here. This is what leaves me truly inspired: these people continue to persevere in defending their land, although the story found the world over tells them they have little hope of winning the battle. Somehow, here, the story has gone differently: for years, the people of Intag have won. The way of life they are fighting to protect has given them the purposeful community that has allowed them to keep their land.

Sumak kawsay, they say. Harmony in equilibrium. It’s a flourishing way of life that has not yet been eradicated by modernization. It has dwindled and hovers desperately near extinction, but it is not gone.

It’s not pure here, now, of course. The places of Ecuador that truly operate around sumak kawsay are places few of us will ever enter. Always in Intag, there remained the awareness that we ourselves were present because of those outside forces, as part of the capitalist tourism industry that also threatens this way of life. The reality of the world today leaves little untouched by the capitalist and socialist economic systems that would undo this way of life. Yet there is still the fervent hope that we might enter this community without contributing to its destruction, and that by visiting, we might come to love the way of life we have glimpsed in our stay. By entering it, we, too, might understand the war against it and seek to protect it.

I’m no tabula rasa here, but that doesn’t mean the experience can’t leave a profound mark. In the constant sculpting and resculpting of self, even a few moments can reshape a person. Through some strangely deep, mundane way, those five days marked me. We breathed a different air there: it’s damp and thick and full of peaceful wonder.