The Mountain that Breathes Fire: Fuego Volcano
The Mountain That Breathes Fire
There is a mountain in Guatemala that never really sleeps. Its name is Fuego, which means fire, and right now the whole world is finally looking at it... though the people who live in its shadow have never once been able to look away.
I was there in July. Antigua sits in a valley cradled by volcanoes, and Fuego is the one that talks. You feel it before you understand it, a low breath in the earth, a shudder that you learn to stop mistaking for a passing truck. By the time we visited, it was already restless, already stretching and grumbling and sending up its plumes like it had something to say. And I did what I always do... I got as still as I could, and I listened, and I lifted my camera.
I have photographs I still can't quite believe I took. Fire fountains against a dark sky. Ash blooming out of the summit like a slow gray flower. That moment right before dawn when the crater glows a color that has no name, somewhere between rose and ember and warning. It is one of the most magnificent things I have ever witnessed with my own eyes. There is no filter for it. There is no reel that does it justice. You just stand there feeling very small and very lucky and very awake.
But I want to be careful with the word magnificent, because Fuego is not a spectacle. It is a neighbor.
As I write this, Fuego has moved into a more explosive phase, this is exactly what my video was about that morning. I was not camera ready but I had to highlight the fact that hikers were making their way up the might before! Today, Guate has raised one of its highest alert levels across the country. Families are being evacuated from the villages closest to the slopes. Pyroclastic flows, the fastest and most dangerous thing a volcano can do, are moving down the ravines on the southern and western flanks. The trails up Fuego and up neighboring Acatenango, where travelers like me go to watch the fire from a safe distance, are closed. And everyone who knows this mountain is holding the same memory in their chest... 2018, when Fuego took so much and so many, and the grief settled into the land and never fully left.
So this is not a postcard. This is a prayer.
Because here is the thing about standing at the base of something ancient and alive. It humbles you. It reminds you that the earth is not a backdrop for our photographs, it is a body, breathing, older than every border we have drawn on top of it. The Maya knew this long before any of us arrived with our cameras. Fire is sacred here. Fire is ceremony, offering, ancestor, and warning, all at once. I felt that truth in July, in the smoke and the shudder and the glow, and I feel it harder now, watching from my kitchen in New Orleans while families in Escuintla and Sacatepéquez pack what they can carry and go.
I hope the mountain quiets soon. I hope every family in its path is held, sheltered, and counted safe. I hope the world that is watching Fuego this week keeps watching Guatemala long after the ash settles, because this country gave me some of the most beautiful days of my year, and it deserves more than our attention when it burns.
Fuego, the volcano of fire. Magnificent, and merciless, and never, ever ours to tame.
Keep them safe. All of them.
With a second line in my step wherever the rhythm carries me, Karlita
Karla Marie “Karlita” Cochran
In the Spotlight 504 New Orleans
