People cannot resist fire for long. Once in a while, it reminds us of its rapid, uncheckable viciousness. Because it also heals and reinvigorates through its destruction, we always come back. But the threat remains.
The town inside the volcano
Fogo Island rises raw and rugged three hundred miles off the coast of West Africa, the top ten thousand feet of an active volcano forming a patch of arable land fifteen miles across and flat in only one place. That flat place is the caldera, the crater of the volcano, where eons of successive eruptions have created a landscape so brutal and shattered that very little can survive. The caldera lured us here, convincing us to brave the fights with airline officials, the constant warnings that we would not make it back to Praia to catch our fight back to Dakar, and the eventual return to Dakar a day late for work. We came for the natural beauty, but also because of a curious fact about the caldera: people live here.
The community of Cha de Calderas has rebuilt itself twice in my lifetime. People live here because the soil is highly fertile, full of minerals brought up from inside the earth, allowing them to grow cash crops such as wine grapes. Tourism brings in extra income. Their decision is a calculated gamble: you cannot look anywhere in the caldera without seeing the signs of eruption. Pico de Fogo, a thousand-foot stratovolcano of its own within the caldera, looms overhead.
A 17th century eruption caused mass emigration from the island. It had previously been one of the most economically important in Cape Verde, but has never recovered that position. Smaller eruptions from volcanoes within the caldera have followed constantly. In 1995, Cha de Calderas evacuated during a minor eruption which destroyed most homes in the town. The people came back, re-planted, sought tourism, and the boom time was on, until the volcano came alive again in 2014. The people left again as thick lava covered nearly all of their homes. The top of their roofs remain visible through the rubble. And then the people came back. We wanted to see what it felt like to be in a town built upon the visible remnants of its destruction, with the cause of that destruction even more visible, looming, ready to strike again.
To the Cha de Caldeiras
I only become extroverted when I am trying to save money. We saw the fellow tourists in the airport before our flight to Fogo; before we had boarded, we had established that they were a couple of honeymooners from France. Soon after, we agreed to split the cost of a taxi from the airport to Cha de Caldeiras.
On the flight to Fofo, we saw the peak dramatically poking out of clouds obscuring the rest of the island- our goal, delivered to our sore eyes by the mountain gods. We did not know yet that it would be our first sight of the mountain for a while.
We touched down and grabbed the first taxi up to the Cha. The drive into the caldera was surreal, breathtaking, and deeply unsettling. We came up endless winding roads through green, idyllic fields and small towns, leaving the sea far below us. When there was nowhere higher to go, we came around a corner and found ourselves in a brutal world of wind, rock, and cloud. The caldera walls filled our vision to the left, brown-grey, most of a thousand feet high, to our left, with strange, smooth, dark clouds spilling and shifting over the lip. The Pico rose to our right, higher and darker still, with a massive disc-cloud forming and whipping around its summit. The ground was made of tortured rock: chunks the size of cars and houses, sharp as knives, jumbled, with no visual line to follow and no comforting softness whatsoever. The road looked pitiful in this landscape, destined to be swept away. We followed it into the caldera, towards the people who call this place home.
We met a guide and set a 6am departure, hoping that the swirling, scudding clouds that kept the summit hidden would be gone by the morning.
On the Volcano
By 10am we were at the summit, but the experience was much less glorious than expected. Dawn had brought moments of clear weather, but we must have offended the mountain by our smooth climb up a vein of good rock among volcanic scree. It brought in thick, cold clouds. We huddled with the honeymooners on the summit, inadequately dressed against the rain and wind.
It was funny to imagine that in a whole radius of a thousand miles- covering the entire country as well as the neighboring ones- we were in the one place where it was possible to be this cold. Our friends were less amused, and after twenty minutes of fruitless, stressful waiting, they said they wanted to go down. We generously agreed- who were we to disrupt a honeymoon?
The descent was wild and tough and wonderful. We warmed out hands around warm geothermal openings in the rock, and then set off at a dead run down the black scree, through the pouring rain, absolutely wet and covered by the pieces of the mountain. My phone stubbornly refused to take pictures of the scene that was raw and beautiful. All around us was grey- the sky and the mountainside converged at the end of sight, maybe 100 feet around us, and shut us in a world of rock and rain. It was impossible to tell how much longer we would be running down the scree. Our guide’s red jacket led the way, the sole bright spot in the universe. We held hands and bounded down together like soaking-wet dogs. The sole of my left boot fell off halfway down, and I gave up the idea that shoes weren’t meant to be jammed with rocks in every crevice. The honeymooners grimly hung on.
Finally, we made it to the huge sulfur pit at the bottom of the scree that marked the location of the 2014 eruption. That eruption destroyed our guide’s house, and the whole town. We trudged home to our hotel, said goodbye to the honeymooners as they headed back to the airport to keep to their tight schedule, and relaxed as the clouds slowly parted and revealed a beautiful afternoon. We decided not to climb it again the next morning- been there, done that! And ultimately we had experienced it in the best and wildest way we could have asked.
The People of the Caldera
After the climb, we spent two nights in the Caldera among the people of Cha. They are normal and light-hearted and perhaps most unsurprisingly, rational. Most tourist narratives indicated that people live here because it is their home, and there’s some indefinable pull in that. We certainly saw that that is the case for some people here, but it’s not the strongest factor. Most people in Cha are making a hard calculation. They look at their prospects in Cape Verde and see limited opportunities in this archipelago with so little arable land. They compare that to their chances in the brutal, beautiful paradise of the Caldera, where the science and more importantly their intuition will let them evacuate in time to save their lives but not their livelihoods. They find that the life in the Caldera, even if it will only last 15 or 20 or 50 years, is better- for them.
And they dig out the rubble to clear spaces for their houses. And they do their laundry. And they tend their crops, and guide tourists up the Pico, and get together at night to play music in th biggest re-built building, and buy secondhand clothes from the truck that comes up from the market once a week, and use their phones to maintain the connection between their own tiny place in the world and the rest of it. And the wheel of life keeps turning in the Cha.
Two days later, we found the perfect postscript to the story. The flight our friends were supposed to take out of Fogo had been cancelled. We all could have waited to climb the mountain in good weather. In the end, though, we would never trade the wild run down the rainy scree for any views. The honeymooners joined us for our flight back to Praia the next day.***
