Hell Hath No Fury…

From a string hammock on Roberto’s terrace, I watch with a group of friends as waves crash into the adjacent buildings, tearing down in minutes the reinforcements it’s taken a dozen men several days to build. A large chunk of driftwood slams into the wooden pylons beneath us, rattling the wood and bamboo house where we jokingly speculate on how long it will take to topple the building into the sea.

“I don’t own land!” wails Roberto, an Italian street sweeper-slash-surfer, as huge breakers bite into the sand beneath his house, eating away the foundations. “I bought a piece of the Pacific Ocean!”

Roberto spends six months of every year doing a mindless job in Geneva so he can live in Mompiche for the other six months. Twelve years have passed in this leisurely way. The locals call him Gallo (Rooster) for his long narrow face and large chicken-beak-shaped nose, and his penchant for surfing.

“I come here to surf,” he states when I first meet him. “If I can’t do that, I’d be better off somewhere else.”

Gathering speed on the crest of a wave, the loose piece of driftwood smashes into the wooden stairs, catching and ripping off the banister; the rounded side of a long sawed-off log. Washed into the sea, the banister begins pounding at the house, its rusted five-inch nails threatening deadly harm to anyone who tries to stop it. Powered by the ocean, the banister and the driftwood rush at the pylons. Somewhere below, wood cracks loudly. The whole balcony shudders.

“Look on the bright side,” consoles Fabio as foam surges over the steps. “We can go fishing right off the terrace!”

Fabio is Roberto’s best friend of twenty-plus years. He looks like a French painter; pointy nose, thin mustache, sparse goatee. A beret and palette would not look out of place. Throwing a pretend line into the water, he reels in an imaginary marlin.

“If the water gets too deep,” quips Johnny, readying his bicycle for the ride to Bolivar, another village southwards down the coast. “You can always build an island.”

After quick farewells, Johnny waits a moment for the receding wave, then carries his bicycle down the wobbly stairs on his shoulder.

“If you can’t be good, call me!” Johnny shouts as he rides away.

An hour later, at the peak of the first of eight massive king tides, surrounded by bubbling seawater, the house becomes a fragile mini-island as water races underneath and across the road, disappearing into the vacant lot on the other side.

Further down the beach, palm trees are ripped out by their roots and hurled onto the sand. Bamboo stilt houses topple into the sea, their foundations standing naked after being stripped of planks and cane. The porcelain toilet in Mustafa’s rental cottage makes a brave stand, staying in place while the rest of the two-story house disintegrates around it. Crashing waves break up the cement walls and the floor caves in.

The remains of Mustafa’s house after two days of high tides smashing the walls.

Uprooted trees litter the sand. Buildings sit askew, torn from their foundations. Upended grass-topped umbrellas are strewn randomly along the shore. Despite tireless efforts to save them, Figu’s wooden stairs stand vertical in the sand.

Is this Mother Nature’s revenge? I wonder. For the needless destruction of the mangroves, for the relentless deforestation, for the super-hotel developments, for the air-pollution, for stealing ton upon ton of sand from the beach, for illegal fishing, for man’s ignorance of nature, for the arrogance with which man has ravaged Mother Nature for so long? Or is it a cyclic weather pattern that we are experiencing, up close and personal, that we have no control over?

From day to day, for weeks, months, the villagers battle nature. Within minutes, a full day’s work is destroyed and buildings are left naked to survive the elements. Everyone stands by and watches, helpless as seawater invades every crevice. News crews flock in to interview the locals. Mompiche will be on the national news by dark. It will be international by morning.

On the water, a handful of surfers take advantage of the unusually large beach break, dropping off before they crash headlong into shore front buildings. Towards The Point, kids on body boards skim out of control over the foam until the fierce waves dump them back onto the beach.

As the water recedes, four men begin to rescue Roberto’s stairs. Heaving them over bare shoulders, they carry the fragile staircase around the house, leaning it against the side of the house. Less than an hour later, a vehicle smashes against the stairs. They’re askew and broken.

“Gonna turn the house into an aquarium,” says Roberto as the sea surges under his house. “Put in a glass floor and go scuba diving off the balcony here.”

Roberto and Didi, a friend from Portugal, mime scuba divers preparing to roll back off the side before they drop into the water.

By mid-afternoon, there is nothing in the bay. The tourists vanish. Cars disappear. The beach is awash. As waves recede, the red fireball of setting sun reflects brightly on clean wet sand.

A dozen fishermen gather to pull their boats back from the waterline, rolling them over thick balsa logs. Shoulders push into bows, neck and arm muscles become rigid, chest muscles pump, as the green and blue fiberglass boats rumble awkwardly backwards up to higher ground.

“Twenty years ago,” muses Pichi, taking in the devastation around him, “this beach was at least one hundred meters wide.”

Now the sea is on his doorstep. The two bottom stairs are buried under sand.

“In twenty-three years in Mompiche, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says, awed by the force of the Pacific Ocean.

The eight-point-eight earthquake in Chile has rattled everyone. Some believe the higher waves are the result of a tsunami bounce-back from the Humbolt current crossing paths with another current. Others shrug and say that the sea rises a bit more at this time every year.

“When I was born, Mompiche was over there on The Point,” says Doña Sara, indicating the tips of the jagged rocks peaking out from under the breakers. That was sixty-five years ago. The sea has gradually risen every year that she can remember. Twice, the village has been moved back and rebuilt on safer ground.

Now, the village is under threat of being swamped once again. Torrential thunderstorms and exceptional high tides over several weeks leave Mompiche inundated. At high tide, the rocks on The Point disappear, the occasional spout is the only indication that they exist. Fallen trees and broken fences line the shore. Debris from the rivers at each end of the village litter the beach. Palings and driftwood line the edge of the surf, threatening to break the ankles of tourists strolling along the waterline. Optimistic swimmers find their bikinis and speedos filled to bursting with sea-blackened wood chips. A newcomer to the scene could be forgiven for thinking the village has been hit by a hurricane.

“Help me!” demands a man, handing me a shovel.

He steps out of the hole he’s begun and gestures towards the growing pile of sandbags. His effort is futile, but I can’t refuse. We are all in this together. Taking the shovel, I begin filling sandbags. A man wearing an orange Civil Defense t-shirt holds the sacks open while I spill in the sand.

“Do you speak English?” Civil Defense asks, keen to impress by counting out eighteen sandbags in English.

On the beach, twenty men work at filling sandbags, pouring more lost time, more lost money, more lost hope into each white sack. Every day, they take hours to build their barriers, and every day, twice a day, the sea tears them down in less time than it takes to fill one sand bag. The king tides hit morning and evening. Carefully hammered planks are torn asunder, bamboo poles ripped from the sand, the sand-filler washed out, sandbags flung around the beach. Large blocks of cement are strewn into the sand as if they weigh nothing. Each morning, the villagers gather the debris and spend the day putting a semblance of safety back together, preparing for the evening tide.

Out in the bay, several boatloads of people cruise by on the high tide to watch what happens to Mompiche as huge waves crash over the shore. Disaster tourism; a whole new economical angle for Ecuador.

Six men strain to move a fallen coconut tree after seawater washes it over the sandbagged bank. First, it has to be pulled from the ruins of the previous day’s reinforcements. Broken planks and poles are pulled from around the tree, still swinging with the current. A rope is tied around the middle. Two men pull from the water. Four push the root end of the tree. They shove their shoulders in, plant their feet in the sand and push. Nothing happens. Grunting loudly, they try again. Nothing happens. Another man joins in and they slowly turn the tree over. Over twenty-five feet long, swaying wildly under the waves, the trunk threatens to bash the pylons holding up the house. It’s like a missile in turbulent water. After a huge effort, seven men successfully float it into the water. They push it into the waves and let it go. By the time the waterline recedes, the trunk is back on the beach in front of someone else’s house.

The next day, waves froth over the sandbagged bank, thick with foam the color of cappuccino. The air around Roberto’s house becomes foul with a strange stench. Fabio screws up his nose.

“It smells like crap,” he states. “It’s probably leaking from someone’s septic tank.”

We gape at the foamy water, horrified. The contents of every septic tank along the beach front is floating in the water all around us.

“Typhoid shot, anyone?”

Suddenly, one of the steps from Morongo’s bar, a thick trunk about three-feet long crashes against the pylons right below where we are standing. The house cracks loudly and shudders. Fabio pulls me back towards the kitchen, as if we’ll be safer there when the house falls down. I go back to the railing in time to see the same log careening straight through the center of the two pylons at the front of the house. A lethal projectile that misses its target.

While the rest of us are at the rail, our attention focused on the unstoppable force of nature, Roberto sits in his hammock and strums his guitar.

“When the tide starts going down, the surf will be really good!” he says, resigned to whatever fate destiny has in store for him and his house.

A motorboat, stuck out in the bay during the rising tide, catches a wave and rides in on the crest, letting the water carry it to shore. The driver pulls up the motor and lets momentum take the launch into a perfect parking spot on high ground. The neighbors cheer as the vessel speeds past the side of the house.

“I’m gonna replace the house with an old boat,” muses Roberto. “When the water comes up, we’ll float. We could have a party here while the other houses fall down around us.”

Roberto’s sarcastic optimism makes me laugh out loud. Going in search of food, I clamber down the rickety stairs, which are now at the back of his house, on the street side. They’re crooked, sloping scarily upwards, and I have to hang on with my toes to get down safely.

As the sun sets brilliant red on one end of the bay, ominous black rainclouds gather on the other. Battle-weary residents straggle to the shore front to survey the damage before retiring for the night, gazing along the beach littered with the detritus of human desperation; rocks, planks, bamboo poles, busted sandbags. After a silent survey, they go home to rest, to get ready to start over again in the morning.