Mexico -- Once Upon A Volcano -- A Child's Tale About A Village Buried By A Volcano Comes To Life In Southwest Mexico's Highlands

STATE OF MICHOACAN, Mexico - Two mules grazing at a fence post stopped chewing and stared at my bus as it careened past them, blaring mariachi music.

In the distance clouds of dust trailed a truck as it wound across a hilly corn field. The truck was headed toward a village dominated by a white church that gleamed in the morning sunlight.

Beyond, ancient volcanoes, verdant after eons of inactivity, rimmed the horizon here in southwestern Mexico's volcanic highlands.

Suddenly, my seatmate, a wiry, old Mexican in a white cowboy hat, pointed out the window like he'd seen a snake.

"Volcan de Paricutin," he breathed.

A few miles to the west I could see a coal-black cone, vivid against the green mountains, belching plumes of steam. Paricutin, a volcano with an unusual history, was venting after the previous week's torrential rains. It was where I was headed.

Months earlier I had been reading a yarn to my 5-year-old daughter about a Mexican farmer who lived in a little village in a house with only one room.

"Nothing ever happens," the farmer had continually complained to anyone who would listen.

But one afternoon as he and Pablo, his son, were plowing his corn field with his ox, their blade got stuck in a strange hole. As they worked to free the plow, smoke poured out and a mound formed. They heard a horrible rumbling below. A volcano was being born under their feet. They ran for their lives.

The mound quickly grew into a seething monster that glowed at night. It hurled ash and red hot stones, then spewed lava. Within months it had buried the village, like Vesuvius had done to Pompeii, in Italy, in 79 A.D. Only the altar and steeple of the village church survived.

Later, I learned that the storybook, "Hill of Fire" by Thomas P. Lewis, wasn't just a yarn. Paricutin, a new volcano in Mexico's south-central volcano belt, had erupted in 1943 in a farmer's cornfield. Only once before in recorded history - on Tenerife in the Canary Islands - had the birth of a volcano from ground zero been witnessed by a human.

The next time we read the book I told my daughter I was going to go to Mexico to find the volcano and the buried village.

"Can you find the little children?" she asked a little sadly, putting her thumb in her mouth and fingering her blanket. She was looking at a picture of the village children watching their houses get buried a half-century earlier.

"I don't think so," I said. She looked at me. "Well, maybe," I said.

On horseback

I traveled overland to the volcano. From the town of Nogales by the Arizona-Mexico border I took the Estrella del Pacifico train down Mexico's Pacific coast to Guadalajara, then took a bus up into the volcanic highlands of the state of Michoacan, passing through the towns of Morelia, Patzcuaro, and Uruapan. Now I was nearing Angahuan, a Purepecha Indian village at 7,000 feet. It was my jumping-off point for the last part of my journey to Paricutin, by horseback.

I struck a deal, hiring a horse and guide, and rode off into my daughter's book. The volcano was three hours away.

Miguel, my Indian guide, galloped ahead as we climbed into the increasingly lifeless, cinder-blanketed high country. He was a thin, quiet, 14-year-old, who looked as if he had stepped out of an Aztec mural. But he was a Purepecha, descended from Tarascans who were ancient rivals of the Aztecs.

Paricutin, one of the world's largest cinder cones, began to loom. An Indian man appeared from a farmhouse. We stopped. He looked at us from the porch, taking my measure with raven-colored eyes. A skinny dog cowered next to him.

The man began speaking with Miguel in a language that is unlike any in the world - Purepecha, the native tongue of these indigenous people who are spread across the western part of Mexico's volcanic cordillera. The descendants of the Tarascans speak Spanish only as a second language.

In Spanish I asked the man if he knew anyone who, as children, might have watched Paricutin rise from the ashes of the cornfield. He shook his head. His grandparents had, he said, but they had since died.

The buried village

Raindrops were cratering the cinder dust an hour later as Miguel and I dismounted. He passed me some sweet corn tortillas. Dead ahead was a 30-foot wall of jagged, black lava, the terminus of a basalt river that stretched uphill to Paricutin's flanks, two miles away. The tips of the church spires poked eerily from the black mass, just as they had in the book. It marked the former village of San Juan, now buried.

Miles below us, deep in the earth, the Cocos and American plates were locked in the never-ending tectonic collision that spawns fiery volcanic eruptions across central Mexico.

From Popocateptl, Orizaba, Paricutin and many other volcanoes, magma has repeatedly exploded into the Mexican sky, raining down as ash and enriching the topsoil needed by corn. In fact, corn was first domesticated by ancient Indians in these volcanic highlands.

We climbed onto the lava plain and crossed the brittle black surface to the buried church. The middle two-thirds of the half-block-long structure was buried under lava. Only a steeple and sanctuary protruded at one end, the altar at the other. Nothing else from the village had survived.

It had long been known throughout Mexico as the church of El Senor de los Milagros, "The Lord of the Miracles," a sanctuary where, after his cure in the 16th century, a cripple had danced.

A workman cleaning the main steeple from the scaffolding that surrounded it told me his grandmother was 10 when she'd taken refuge from Paricutin in this church in early 1943. From here she'd seen her house get covered with hot ash.

The rain of ash didn't let up that year. Creeks boiled, animals died, birds dropped from the sky like stones. Lava spread over the land like hot tar.

In spring 1944, with lava approaching, a bishop led a mass exodus from San Juan. The lava engulfed the village and pushed into the center of the church where it stopped, for good, in front of the altar. The workman said his grandmother never returned to the valley.

Paricutin's intense activity dropped off after 1944, but it didn't quit. By 1952, when it last erupted, the volcano had spewed lava onto nearly 15 square miles of the Michoacan countryside, and had grown 1,400 feet.

Up the cone

Heavy rain and wind swept in from Paricutin. Miguel and I took refuge under an exposed corner of the old altar, wrapped in ponchos.

My horse, Tequila, was steaming after the shower passed. Lightning flashed as the storm headed northwest over the mountains.

Miguel and I rode on. We passed up through a gap between two house-sized cinder hills, then out onto a vast ashfield. We led our horses across on foot. Paricutin's cone now filled the sky. Steam poured from side vents. We tied the horses to an ash-spattered bush.

My chest burned as I scrambled up the black cone, trying to keep up with Miguel, who had grown up in this thin air. Wind gusts raised clouds of ash.

The summit, at 10,400 feet, was marked by a 10-foot high cross which had been driven into the ash. It seemed to soar in and out of the vapor that streamed up from dozens of vents in the ash canyons crisscrossing the crater, hundreds of feet below.

Above us, a hawk spiraled on updrafts, then began to descend into the valley. It glided over fields of lava, then onto patches of corn now trying to spread back into the volcanic zone. The hawk headed toward the distant spire that marked the buried village.

We slid down a steep ash chute to our horses as thunder echoed across the valley. Another squall had swept upslope from the tropical Pacific and across the 14,600-foot Volcan Nevado de Colima, far to the west. But only rainbows fell on the lowlands as we descended.

Night in Angahuan

Two shy Purepecha girls peeked from their door as we rode back into Angahuan. Farmers were returning for the day. Miguel's 7-year-old brother came running up, took my reins and rode off proudly behind his big brother.

I rented a cabin from the Centro Turistico de Angahuan on the "mirador," a prominence west of the village overlooking Paricutin and the buried village. The sun began to drop behind the volcano. As I walked the mile to the village center, shops were opening for the evening. Children raced over the cobbles, kicking balls, chasing pups, glancing sideways at me.

Angahuan is typical of Purepecha villages in the region. It has a main plaza, wooden dwellings, not much electricity and dusty streets. On the plaza is a 16th-century church, the Iglesia de Santiago Apostol. Facing the church, a few doors from the plaza, is a wooden door carved with the history of Volcan de Paricutin.

Lanterns and cooking fires were lit. The stars came out, brilliant in the thin air. Announcements in Purepecha drifted out of a loudspeaker on the plaza. I drank refrescos (soft drinks) at two kiosks and made conversation about the volcano. There were people who'd seen the 1943 eruptions, I heard, but it would be difficult to find them.

I asked about a place to eat. The plaza restaurant was closed for a week I was told.

A little boy came up and said he could take me to a place to eat. He led me down side streets to a wooden house with a beautiful weaving over the doorway. A sign said Restaurante Eva. Some children were out front with an old woman who wore hoop earrings and a large apron.

The boy smiled at her and said to me, "Es mi abuela Eva (She's my grandma Eva)."

She put down her broom and led me into a dimly lit dining room. As I waited I saw an old picture of the volcano on the wall. It struck me that Eva might know someone who had seen Paricutin erupt, so I asked. With a twinkle in her eye she said she'd be back in a moment.

A girl from the storybook

She returned with two creased black and white photos, dated 1943, which she set on the checkered tablecloth in front of me. She turned up the lamp. The first photo showed Paricutin erupting. The second showed townspeople, soldiers and children in front of some houses. Gray ash was falling like snow. Possessions were stacked on porches.

She pointed at one of the little children, a girl holding her mother's hand.

"Eva," she said. She was the girl in the picture. She had been 5 years old.

She told me of being evacuated to the mountain village of her cousins, a place with real snow. She recalled her family's return much later to help rebuild the village at a safer location near the old one. With a young girl's smile, she described the wonderful celebration fiesta at its completion.

Her eyes sparkled as she talked about breaking her first pinata, a papier-mache globe filled with surprises.

She was pleased to learn that she was one of the little people in my daughter's book. I snapped souvenir photos of her and her grandchildren.

Back home, weeks later, my daughter was motoring around her bed with her new Mexican dolls as I told her about finding one of the children in her book. As I finished the story of Eva and the rebuilt village, she stopped playing and looked at me.

"Did the pinata at her fiesta have lots of candy in it?" she asked.

"Probably" I said.

"I wish we had a volcano" she muttered.

Jack Nilles is a Seattle freelance writer.