We'd take our horses deep inside, but we never reached the tunnels' ends." We always suspected that the caves had been carved by water, by long dried-up underground springs. We'd take our horses up there, and we'd go exploring in the catacomb of natural caves that had wormed in through the earth over time. "That was one gorgeous place, thick with trees. "Now that was a farm, Beth," Bill, my husband, tells me while I lie in bed, a fever brimming. It is impossible to understand the stories my husband tells me now about La Gloria, the expanse of land that was a coffee farm before developers turned it into Las Colinas, the latest death trap. It is impossible to stop the land from speaking, impossible to ordain it with a conscience, impossible to teach it: This is a family, this is a child, this is a people's history. It precipitated the rise of the "cardboard for walls and bottle caps for nails" communities that still thrive, all these years later, on the highway's median strips. In 1986, a few months after I had returned from my first visit to El Salvador, a massive earthquake toppled the country's capital, leaving countless dead and countless more without homes. In the mid-1960s, the earth knocked against itself in the middle of the night, and my husband, 8 years old at the time, yanked his youngest brother from the crib and ran them both to safety on roiling ground. Revolutions coincided with eruptions of every geophysical confabulation. Lakes disappeared and new mountains warped up in their place. Volcanoes blew, turning hillsides into rivers of red lava. At least six times, between 15, earthquakes shook El Salvador's capitals to the ground, like so many dogs shaking their coats to remove the wet. Because of a baptism that had ended on time, not minutes later, when the cathedral would be lying in a smolder.Ĭentral America is a noisy land - opinionated, self-serving, notoriously dissatisfied with its own design. Those who were saved were saved because of luck - because of an errand that had taken them away from home, because of a traffic jam that had delayed their return, because of a plate of hot tortillas they were delivering to a neighbor. Before there was time to look up and run, a swath of suburbia was swallowed whole, entombed in a mudslide that stopped six blocks short of Nora's front door. Whatever was in their path fell prey - the clustered houses that sat on the mountain's lower face, the children spinning tops in the narrow streets, the idle conversations between neighbors. She wore her best church dress as she ran along the ground that had gone vertical in an instant.ĭown the street, meanwhile, in a neighborhood of Santa Tecla called Las Colinas, mansions were tumbling from the sky, plunging from their mountain berths in a storm of dust and drama. Nora, my mother-in-law, is 68, a divorcée with a bad leg. What had been level rose like molten concrete waves, so that she went up and down but not forward as she ran toward an open space where only sky was at risk of crashing down. She was returning from a baptism and looking ahead to the afternoon when she heard the bellow and felt the pavement beneath her move. My mother-in-law was parking her jeep in her carport when it happened. 13, in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the earth parted its jagged jaws and roared.
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