Myths

It's those rare moments, when I truly feel like I'm traveling, like my body is free of dissent and refusal to conform to the authority of everyday life and my mind is free from monitored experimentation, that I realize the hardships are small tokens, a mere few pesos in the economy of my experience, for an afternoon of volcano-dipping. It has not been easy, never once, living in Cartagena and working at a Technological Institution, for so many obvious reasons--how could a young writer, desperately searching for inspiration and walking an unrequited search for something better, feel satisfied among the next generation of engineers and mathmaticians? Yet I wonder: perhaps, if I have been simply looking too hard to find my future or my prized piece of writing in my foreign experience, if I have been trying too ferociously to devour my journey in order to find something worth writing about, then it's possible I have compartmentalized and diluted my life from what it really is. I'm looking for myth, for an alchemy of inspiration, in a world that is as practical as it is logical. But as life is uncertain, so is the future unwritten, and I only continue to praise life and the strangeness that is the sun, the moon, and the Colombian mud volcanoes.

So it was, after escaping my conservative skin and jumping into a lovely, sunny, exotic mud world, that I found myself covered in a sloppy, muddy, creamy substance praised for its exquisite medical properties. I was, in fact, a vague human face with a mask on--a mask of goopy, decayed organic material and gases from the dinosaur epoch. Certainly not many of us know what decaying dinosaur remnants feel like. The morning had been simple: Neil, Johanna, Bua, and I set off, bathing suits and towels in tow, up the Caribbean Coast, arriving at Cienaga del Totumo, a lovely coastal lagoon, early Sunday morning. We stripped to our summer unmentionables, tip-toed our way to the large grey mud pit, scaled up the ramshackle stairs placed precariously up the side of the volcano without regards to the physics of deep inclines, and dunked our toes into the slimy, muddy orifice.

Inside the crater were already a group of traveling Colombian grandmas, bobbing around and splashing each other with creamy, warm handfuls of muddy lava. This hilarious episode nearly had me exploding into giggles: a bunch of elderly, overweight, slightly wrinkled ladies frolicking around with mineral mud caked on their faces and slopped into their curly hair, floating around inside a volcano, is surely a comic relief to anybody's worst problem. Their faces, arms, back, and chests looking like concrete statues from either a terribly unattractive era in statue-molding or a bad day in Fernando Botero's workshop, what with their colored eyeballs and pink lips poking through chubby stone faces. Yet, as bizarre as it was, we tested the goop for ourselves and hailed to the sorcery of medicinal mud, dunking our own bodies in the mystic, creamy concoction.

The sun was bright, the lagoon dotted with afternoon diamonds, and the stone faces cheerfully chiseled in smiles; meanwhile, the magic mud volcano sloshed, gurgled, burped, and churned around us, occasionally popping out huge gas bubbles everyone mistakenly believed to be someone's ill stomach. We were, needless to say, quite the spectacle, swimming like hippos in fresh water, graciously slipping through thick, whipped seas, our legs dangling below us in an infinite abyss. Gravity, I might add, does not exist in this natural phenomenon, and for that reason precisely, I have compared us to a traveling band of hippos. Like them, I found us sifting through the water, often feeling our rear ends suddenly losing their grip under water and softly (but stubbornly!) rising to the surface and peeking out above the break in the surface.

They say it's magic mud, and after dunking myself, feet-first, into its gaseous depths, I can't say for sure how far the truth lies from the myth, or how much I want it to. The myth, of course, is this: according to the Tayronas, the ancient Indian tribe once inhabiting Colombia's coast, testifies that the Totumo volcano once spewed fire from its inner devil's lair; however, the local priest, being quite the magnanimous city-saver and worrier of salvation, doused the screaming fire with holy water and thus drowning Satan in a suitable pile of thick mud. This myth continues with the origins of the mud, adding that the ancient spirits of the ancestral world heaved forth from the depths of the ground to smother the devil in his unworthy actions.

On the other hand, popular science (often, naturally, overruled to myth on grounds of Realism and this era of practicality), suggests that the phenomenal mud holds its mysterious, occult powers due to the gases emitted from the rotting animal and plant flesh deep underground, which in turn force the muddy mixture upwards. It is simple science.

For what it's worth, anyway, I'll take the fairy tale to rotten animal matter anyday. I've seen enough technological advances in my semester at the Tecnologica to satisfy my science mind for a while, and besides, haven't we already lost so much of the magic in our lives already?