Soon after hanging up, Lorena called and asked me why I had lied about coming over today. I told her I had been preparing to come over but ended up on the phone for 7 hours. On the heels of Lorena’s phone call, I got a call from the States lasting about 2 hours. Thus, with the exception of dinner and about 15 minutes of typing, I had been on the phone from 11:30 am ‘til 10pm.

      After lunch, Ivan borrowed the Windows 95 installation disc and fixed a problem both of the old computers were having with their color settings. Around 3 or 4 pm, I went to internet in Santa Elena, where I uploaded pictures to this website and deleted emails in my hotmail account that had been around for nearly a year. I left for Tambo after 7pm. After eating, I worked on more web related stuff until 10pm.

      Around 8pm, I wandered to the back edge of Julio’s yard to pee off the sawdust cliff- our night toilet. Standing there, blinking into the night, arcing a fine yellow stream to the East, I came face to face with a phenomenon such as I’ve never before witnessed. A star at about 25 degrees above the horizon was flickering and changing colors in an extraordinary fashion. Its fluctuations went far beyond “twinkling” and its color ranged from a dim white speck to a giant, unmistakably red light, like those atop radio towers. It flickered at times like a candle flame in a breezy room and at other times flashed like a police vehicle pulling someone over a few miles away in the sky. Occasionally, the star snuffed out for a moment altogether. It was tremendously bizarre. After verifying that the star was not an airplane, I became convinced that it was possibly on the verge of a supernova. But the odds of witnessing something like that in the stars that we can see with the naked eye is tremendously improbable and would be something well known and making headlines for years beforehand.

      I went to retrieve Julio and Susanna. Susanna immediately announced that it was an airplane because stars do not turn off and on and aren’t big red lights. I now find Susanna’s remark a bit curious. We in the US take it for granted that the night sky as always full of passing airplanes. But that is not the case with this part of Ecuador. We have a vast ocean to the west and nothing much to our north or south. How many trans-pacific flights do you think leave from Guayaquil? Lots of Ecuadorians vacationing in Thailand, ya think? Meanwhile, there are no commercial planes flying up or down the coast between rinky dink coastal towns. That’s an American luxury. We are not on the way to anywhere else. I have never once seen a commercial flight flying over Tambo. Although the military conducts airforce training exercises over the area sometimes, I have never seen a plane of any kind flying in the night. As far as I know, Susanna has been out of the immediate vicinity of Tambo and has thus had the possibility of witnessing a night plane only twice in her life. What made her remark so nonchalantly that that was an airplane flying over Tambo in the night?

      I told them the light had not moved in the 5 minutes I had watched it prior to their arrival and was not an airplane. The light then showed off for them in grand fashion. We 3 stood as still and as silent as wooden statues for what became an eerily long time. The whole setting felt uneasily supernatural. Minutes passed. Then Julio finally broke the silence by saying “That thing looks cool! I’m gonna shut off this light so we can see it better.”

      To my mind, it almost had to be a regular or perhaps slightly unusual star that was reacting to atmospheric conditions rising out of the campo. Stars here on the equator appear to move a lot faster through the sky than they do in Ohio, and in the 15 minutes we had stood there staring at it, it had risen noticeably off the horizon and its flickering had lessened. Susanna repeated that she did not think it was a star because every other star in the sky was behaving normally. Julio announced that it must be Mars. I have only seen Mars, that I am certain of, for one string of nights in the sky back when its proximity to earth was being touted in the news. I was riding on a bus through the Andes on a crystal clear night and woke up to see if I could tell where we were at. I don’t know if it was the proximity of Mars or the clarity of the high Andean air, but Mars was astoundingly huge and blatantly orange. It gave off so much light that it somewhat lighted the night terrain like a full moon. I knew in one instant, even though I had never to my knowledge seen Mars, that that had to be Mars.

      But this star did not appear to be it. Mars was orangish; this thing was at times red like a radio tower flasher and at other times just a dim white speck. Ive never seen anything in the sky behave like that, but I am assuming it was a star rising in conditions that would have caused a giant blood red moon, had it been the moon rising and not a star. Or maybe something passed in front of a star that amplified the way it is seen on earth? In any event, it was really cool.

      At about 1:30pm, I cruised into central Libertad. I dropped off a roll of film and then went to internet for an hour. After I picked up my film, I took a 20 or more minute walk out to the mall to buy groceries. From the mall, I walked to Lorena’s work and arrived there at exactly at 4pm. Lorena and her coworker were ready to leave when I arrived, surprisingly. We then walked back to central Libertad. Along the way, I indicated a large columnar cactus in a landscaped area that I had been eyeing with envy since having arrived in the peninsula 11 months ago. I told Lorena I wanted to snag a piece off it, mostly just to make conversation. Lorena fired back that we should march straight over and take a piece.

      From the beginning, I had established 2 rules for my now flourishing plant arrangements set in the beds alongside Julio’s house. The first rule was that I was forbidden to pay money for any plant that goes into the garden. This is for several reasons. A rich gringo who pays to install high profile landscaping in a community that could not afford to do likewise is ostentatious, whereas a gringo who makes a flourishing plant bed out of whatever plant scraps he comes across locally, is a fly brotha who demonstrates that plants are for the people, and that growing them is not beyond the pueblo just because we live in a sun scorched hell. Plus, its better to have an ongoing hunt for new sources of planting material to give me something to do and so that my plant beds are forced to evolve slowly, which squelches impulsive planting and gives rise to better ideas. Sure, I could just go out and buy all the plants I want, but then they will be planted according to an aesthetic I had on one single day and I will have killed the golden goose. The creativity that the garden has inspired daily will be finished in one moment. The plant arrangement will not have remained faithful to its fundamentalist roots. It will have become a sell out to a one-time shopping spree.

      The other rule is that I cannot take plants from anywhere they are arguably being cared for. This is to avoid creating my plant beds at the expense of someone else’s beds. Sometimes it is obvious that a plant’s owner is very conscientiously maintaining an immaculate plant bed and other times I have to intuit whether a slovenly bed is such because it is neglected or just because the owners have a less sensitive aesthetic than I. In any event, out of respect for people like myself, I will not touch a plant that I at all suspect anyone is caring for.

      The legal language of rule #2 is quite fuzzy, as you may have noticed. How does one establish that a neglected plant isn’t the apple of someone’s eye who just doesn’t know the first thing about taking care of plants, like Julio? If someone is being paid by a faceless institution to maintain plants, such as with plants in public parks, does paid attention constitute care? Just the fact that a plant is in a public park makes for a tricky situation. 1000 passersby that are 99% indifferent to a plant, constitutes, if not care proper, at least the argument that the plant is serving some kind of public service and should remain fully intact. Then there’s the argument that one could take an insignificant part of the plant from a place it won’t be noticed. You might be thinking that this is all just the mental trappings of an underemployed plant fanatic stranded for far too long in a very boring place- and you’d be right. But the difference I am trying to establish here is one of artistic engagement (however slight) versus mere craftsmanship (however profound). I have a deep respect for the former, and no thoughts on the latter. Enter the case of Trent v. The Municipo Plant Beds.

      I have been searching for a good Organ Pipe style cactus to put a much-needed dramatic flair into the plant beds of Julio’s yard. There are plenty of large Cereus Peruvianus around Santa Elena and Libertad, which is a bluish cactus whose star-shaped stems may grow to 30 feet. However, Cereus Peruvianus tends not to branch freely and many are the C.P.s that stand as solitary crooked, 20-foot poles. The lower extremities become woody and ugly, as the years afford the crisply shaped stem many a nick, ding or chunk removed. Even when grown to a ripe old age with the improbability of much symmetrical branching, it is still so large a cactus that one must regard it from a distance, making it ill-suited to my purposes.

      As C.P.s are far easier to grow from cuttings than from seeds, there is little variation in the local supply, as reproduction from cuttings produces genetic clones. However, if one should be so disposed, C.P.s are among the easiest Organ Pipe cacti to genetically manipulate through selective breeding. It is from just such an improved stock that the Municipio of Libertad has apparently obtained the C.P.s it has planted in one single landscaped bed of the city- the one I told Lorena and her co-worker I wanted to take a piece from.

      The Municipio has many landscaped beds in Libertad, and even where they use the unmodified C.P.s- which is everywhere- they avoid the pitfalls of the breed through maintenance. Julio’s family cannot be trusted to provide maintenance in my absence. This makes the modified C.P.s perfect for my beds. They put so much of their energy into creating branches, that there is no serious vertical growth. The modified C.P.s, standing at about 6 feet tall, already possessed dozens of branches. There was no wood, or if there was, it was being covered up by successive waves of new branches. They are a beautiful plants.

      I have walked past the modified C.P.s for the past 11 months, trying to figure out a loophole in my ethically bolstered rules for acquiring plants. It has always been too iffy. There are lots of branches to choose from, but as yet, the modified C.P.s have never been picked from by anyone. They are all perfect. My scar would be the first. Scarring high-profile, mint-condition public property is ethically indefensible. However, the scar would probably not set a trend and would eventually be obscured by new branches. The scar would probably not detract as much from the overall enjoyment of passersby in Libertad as the grown up cutting would be bringing to Tambo. On balance, the world would be a better place if I took a cutting. But then there was the little issue of vandalizing a cactus above a sign that says “please do not pick plants” in full view of 10 people standing in front of their nearby residences. 11 months of bogged-down debate fell by the wayside with Lorena’s single suggestion of “Let’s go get you a cactus”. The perfect, 17-inch branch snapped off cleanly and easily in my hand, and with this acquisition, the 4-week emotional slump I had been in that had slowly been improving of late, was now officially over.

      I slipped my cactus into a plastic grocery bag as we entered central Libertad. Lorena dropped off film, and then a hunt for a watch battery for me took us off to the Comercio Central, 5 or so blocks away. I bought a battery and a bootleg DVD (Mel Gibson’s overrated “Passion”) and Lorena bought a plastic lunchbox for a neighbor kid starting Kindergarten Monday. Then the Co-worker departed. Lorena and I retrieved her pictures, bought a tub of ice cream and took it down to a shaded area of a nearby section of beach to eat. Then we sat there enjoying the mild breeze from the recent seasonal decline in temperatures, talking as the sun set into the sea. The sky was clear, it felt kinda like fall, and as Lorena slowly became back-dropped by a twilight full of stars, I knew that I was deeply happy to be who I was, where I was. The year I have left to be in this country suddenly seemed just about right.

      Back at Julio’s house, the first thing I did was walk into the room where Julio and Ivan were sitting and without a word snatched the cactus out of its plastic bag. The 2 of them exploded in exclamations, which they followed by laughter and admissions that each of them had recently tried to gaffle a Cereus Peruvianus from various city landscapes. This was very interesting news: they were either trying to obtain a Cereus Peruvianus because they knew I wanted one, or because they have learned to appreciate plants enough to hunt down their own. I told them that this C.P. had come from a plant with tons of branches. Ivan, apparently aware of the significance of this, excitedly told me that his had also been from such a specimen. Julio said there had been too many police in the park in Libertad and Ivan said there had been 2 people close by when he had tried to take one from someone’s yard. I told them I had taken mine in full view of 10 people, which set them off into hysterics. They think I only got away with it because no one knew what to say to a crazy cactus-pickin gringo.

      Julio and I made our rounds to all the Femininos to collect the money and tickets they were supposed to bring over to us today but hadn’t. Every one of them asked for an extension. When we returned to the house, we found that the rest of the family had gone down to Merci’s tienda. Julio then headed over there himself. I went to bed.

      At 4:30pm, Lorena’s sister Angela poked her head in my window and told me Lorena had sent her to get me and my bootleg Jesus flick. Even though my pirated copy of Passion was a quality bootleg, it could not make up for the disappointment of the movie’s mediocrity. It was a movie about Jesus and nothing more. Plenty of movies exist just like it. The movie’s reputation, which has made it at least as far as Ecuador, is completely unwarranted. Can’t anyone ever make a Jesus movie or for that matter a holocaust movie without the media going crazy? Two words: played out. I should have known better. Mel Gibson is an idiot.

      Lorena teared up during the movie. Had I thought it any kind of genuine appreciation of anything, and not just plain old Catholic Guilt, I wouldn’t have minded. As it was, I told her I would shut the movie off if she didn’t stop crying. Sobbing Catholic Guilt is exactly the reaction Mel Gibson was shooting for. Finally the movie ended and we put on a Pixar flick about bugs while we ate mass amounts of popcorn Lorena had popped up.

      After the bug movie, I was tired and took myself home. Before retiring to bed, I checked on the “star” we had seen going crazy in the sky 2 days earlier. It was still doing its thing, but not quite as bombastically as before. I found another star near the southern horizon behaving similarly. By 9pm, I was asleep in bed.

      A knock on my wooden shutters woke me up. It was Lorena, come to hand over her raffle ticket booklet and the money she had collected, not imagining I would already be in bed. The street was fairly dark and a cluster of neighbors sitting in chairs in the street 2 doors up were twisted around in their seats watching what they were sure was a scandalous rendezvous unfolding. As we talked through my window, Lorena told me to flip on my light bulb so people could see from a distance that nothing shady was afoot. Lorena had single-handedly sold 26 tickets. Even though this made her our top ticket seller, she apologized for not selling more, saying she was too tied up with the kids she nannies to go door to door. I had not even asked her to sell tickets, she had offered. Lorena has never been anything but too good to me.